Marcus Ingram/Getty Images, Red Seat Ventures
Fox's Red Seat Ventures is coming for Substack.
Led by Chris Balfe, Red Seat made its name running sales and production services for podcasters including Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Nancy Grace.
Now, as the lines between creators, podcasters, and writers continue to blur, it's adding newsletter functionality to its stack. The newsletter feature will live under Supercast, a company Red Seat bought this year that offers a menu of subscription options like livestreaming for creators. They can now build free and paid newsletters and track their performance on a dashboard. The newsletter feature is included in Supercast's base pricing of $0.59 per subscriber per month, with custom pricing available for big networks and media companies.
"We want to be a one-stop shop for creators," Balfe told Business Insider. "Whereas Substack has done a really good job going after written-first creators, and then adding podcasting capability on top of that, we're going at it from the other direction and saying, for most of the creators that we work with, their audio and video is their main business. So, let's add other features like email and livestreaming."
Balfe pointed to comedian Tony Hinchcliffe of "Kill Tony" as an early example of Red Seat's success in using a multifaceted approach. Since launching a subscription, Kill Tony+, Hinchcliffe has signed up thousands of people who get his uncensored, ad-free show and bonus content.
Hinchcliffe plans to create another, super-expensive tier where people would pay to get roasted by him, Balfe said.
"It would be like $10,000 or something like that to roast you," Balfe said. "We will sell out of these so bad."
He also pointed to an early pilot of Supercast's livestreaming with "This American Life," which drew more than 1,700 paying audience members.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Netflix
Balfe wants to make Red Seat a creator-economy juggernaut, with some 200 shows. The company has around 30 shows now and is looking to do a lot more deals quickly, especially in sports, lifestyle, entertainment, and tech. Red Seat's top creator deals generally pay a minimum guarantee against projected sales.
"We really want to accelerate our rate of dealmaking," Balfe said. "I think if we did 10 big deals in the next 12 months, that would be big."
Balfe disagrees with industry insiders like iHeartMedia CEO Bob Pittman, who say podcast distribution deals are getting too expensive. He said there was strong advertiser demand and that hosts have the ability to branch out into other areas. Balfe said he's doing deals where the show itself accounts for as little as 60% of the revenue, with the rest coming from other projects.
Balfe also sees the potential for creators to make longer deals. YouTubers are often used to getting short-term ad deals, while Red Seat is pushing for 12-month partnerships for its clients, he said.
"We're trying to do annual deals," he said. "YouTubers are attracted to that sort of consistency that the podcast business model has allowed."
Podcasting has become more of a video-first medium as it has evolved from its audio roots.
Forty-four percent of US podcast consumers watched a video podcast in the past week, up from 40% in 2025, according to a report from trade group Sounds Profitable released this month. YouTube is the top podcast platform, used by 63% in the past 12 months, ahead of Spotify (33%), Netflix (21%), and Apple Podcasts (15%).
Balfe thinks video will continue to grow its share of the pie. People are watching more podcasts on YouTube, especially on TV screens. Spotify is making the case that video consumption outperforms audio on its platform.
Major streamers are also hungry for podcasts, and linear TV players like Versant's MS NOW are looking for lower-cost programming to fill their schedules. Red Seat's shows aren't running on Fox's linear networks today, but Balfe said it's only a matter of time before that happens.
"I look at the next phase of video opportunities, and we have every streamer that wants our content now: Hulu, Peacock, and Amazon Prime, and Paramount Plus," Balfe said. "We also have the linear guys that are starting to come to us and say, 'Actually, what you're producing looks kind of like a talk show. Maybe we should just put it in late night or daytime.'"
In Episode 101 of the Sceptic: Harry Jee on Reform's plan to abolish asylum, Bijan Omrani on his lawsuit against the Church of England's reparations agenda. Plus: Tilak Doshi exposes the Great Recycling Swindle.
The post The Sceptic | Episode 101: Reform’s Plan to Abolish Asylum, the Church of England’s Reparations Agenda. Plus: The Great Recycling Swindle appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
© Graham Dickie for The New York Times
© The New York Times
A Europa está muito atrás dos EUA e da China no desenvolvimento de modelos de inteligência artificial. A estratégia não deve ser, no entanto, gastar amplos recursos financeiros para chegar à frente da corrida, mas antes investir em criar as melhores aplicações para o uso dos modelos existentes, defendem Sofia Marta, country manager da Google Cloud em Portugal, e Arlindo Oliveira, presidente do INESC.
“Não é por não termos um modelo que é o estado da arte desse dia que nos impede de usar modelos”, começou por realçar Arlindo Oliveira, no Transatlantic Talks, o podcast do ECO e da Amcham Portugal, que este ano celebra o 75º aniversário.
“Defenderia uma abordagem mais inspirada na estratégia chinesa do que na estratégia americana, se é que podemos falar de estratégia americana, porque realmente a estratégia americana é uma estratégia das grandes empresas”, afirma o também professor catedrático distinto do Instituto Superior Técnico. “O que nós queremos é ter as melhores aplicações dos modelos que existem. Alguns nossos, outros que não são nossos”, conclui. E deixa um apelo: “vamos pôr as pessoas a usar modelos, vamos pôr as máquinas de lavar, os carros, os comboios, tudo a usar modelos, e não são só modelos de linguagem, são uma série de outros modelos”.
O foco neste momento tem que ser a utilização desta tecnologia em prol da reinvenção daquilo que são os setores tradicionais, ou mesmo a estimulação daquilo que é o ecossistema de inovação na Europa.
Sofia Marta, da Google, concorda. “Neste momento, a Europa não deveria colocar o foco em ter o frontier model mais avançado. O foco neste momento tem de ser a utilização desta tecnologia em prol da reinvenção daquilo que são os setores tradicionais, ou mesmo a estimulação daquilo que é o ecossistema de inovação na Europa”, defende.
“O acesso e a democratização do acesso de uma startup em Lisboa é o mesmo, em termos de capacidade de computação, do que uma startup que está em Silicon Valley”, considera. Para a gestora, o foco deve estar também na “cooperação da Europa com os Estados Unidos, numa ótica de parceria estratégica, de tirar partido daquilo que é infraestrutura, a inovação e o que são estas capacidades tecnológicas, em prol da evolução e do impacto económico que possam ter ao incorporar esta tecnologia”.
A Europa tem várias desvantagens face aos EUA e à China. Arlindo Oliveira aponta a “falta de escala por causa da fragmentação legislativa e até cultural” e a “falta de investimento”. “Qualquer coisa que se faça nos Estados Unidos é muito mais fácil. Não quer dizer que os 50 Estados tenham todos a mesma legislação. Não é esse o caso. Mas são muito mais uniformes em termos de cultura e de legislação. Na Europa é muito mais difícil”, reforça.
“Esta fragmentação que existe na Europa, técnica e funcional, é um dos temas em que per si, cada um dos países, e Portugal em particular, pode fazer o seu caminho”, afirma Sofia Marta. “Se nós trabalharmos também em algo que seja uma interoperabilidade entre os vários países, vai nos dar muito maior escala e teremos mais impacto com as iniciativas que levemos a cabo”, recomenda a country manager da Google Cloud. Para a gestora, seria muito relevante olhar para os temas da infraestrutura, da cloud, da inteligência artificial e dos dados “quase como uma moeda única”, permitindo “circular com fluidez entre os vários países da Europa”.
Sofia Marta afirma que Portugal deveria investir mais em inteligência artificial, apontando que a adoção de cloud em Portugal está nos 38%, acima da média da União Europeia mas “significativamente abaixo da média da OCDE” de 54%. “Por outro lado, se formos olhar para aquilo que é o estado de maturidade, também se calhar muitas dessas organizações que já estão a utilizar cloud estão a fazê-lo para armazenamento ou email, e não efetivamente para uma transformação daquilo que é o seu negócio”, alerta, deixando um apelo: “Temos de realmente acelerar se queremos que Portugal esteja a liderar”.
Arlindo Oliveira também defendeu a necessidade de um maior investimento, apontando o sucesso da Sword, que fez parte de uma das agendas mobilizadoras do PRR, como uma demonstração de que é possível ter retorno. “Nós não precisamos ter sucesso em todos os investimentos; basta que alguns investimentos sejam muito bem-sucedidos”, afirmou, acrescentando que o mesmo pode ser feito no Estado.
Um país pobre não pode ter vícios, mas, se nós não pensarmos também em usar o Orçamento do Estado para investir em ciência e tecnologia, e em AI em particular, vamos andar sempre atrasados.
“O nosso investimento em ciência e tecnologia, em geral, é muito baixo. Nós temos aquela famosa meta dos 3%. Não só estamos muito longe dos 3%, como o que temos é muito criativo. Muito disso é usado através de uma série de subterfúgios”, critica o presidente do INESC. E deixa um alerta: “Um país pobre não pode ter vícios, mas, se nós não pensarmos também em usar o Orçamento do Estado para investir em ciência e tecnologia, e em AI em particular, vamos andar sempre atrasados”.
Sofia Marta recorda um estudo pedido pela Google à Universidade Católica e ao Implement Consulting Group, que concluiu que a adoção de IA pode gerar um aumento de cerca de 8% do PIB português. “Há um espaço de melhoria gigante que não podemos desperdiçar”.
A amarração do cabo submarino Nuvem da Google, que liga Portugal aos EUA, foi concluída em julho. Segundo um estudo da Câmara de Comércio Americana em Portugal (AmCham Portugal), até ao final deste ano, o país deverá contar com 20 cabos submarinos amarrados à costa.
“Neste momento temos quase uma autoestrada que liga Portugal e a Europa à América do Norte, à América do Sul e África. Coloca-nos, de facto, como esse hub digital, de porta para o mundo”, salienta Sofia Marta. “Esta infraestrutura em termos de cabos coloca-nos a nós também num ponto muito apetecível de captação de investimento para os data centers“, acrescenta, juntando ainda o acesso a energia renovável como um fator que distingue positivamente o país.
“Uma das razões pelas quais os Estados Unidos e a China são competitivos nesta área é que a energia lá é muito mais barata do que na Europa, por razões que conhecemos. Portugal, desse ponto de vista, é competitivo, por causa também da nossa estrutura de produção de energia”, concorda Arlindo Oliveira.
A country manager da Google Cloud defende que aumentar a disponibilidade de talento nesta área deve ser uma prioridade. Sofia Marta considera que tem havido um esforço grande para aumentar a literacia digital, mas é necessário ir mais longe, até porque de nada vale ter a infraestrutura se não tivermos as pessoas que têm o conhecimento para tirar partido dela. “Temos que fazer atração, mas temos também que fazer upskilling daquilo que são os conhecimentos da generalidade das pessoas”, defende. A empresa americana tem feito programas de formação em colaboração com a APDC e lançou recentemente a AI Academy, em Coimbra, para o setor público.
“Nós neste momento, dos nossos graduados nestas áreas de engenharia, estamos a perder provavelmente mais de um terço e se calhar 50% para países do Norte da Europa, onde vão ganhar salários muito mais elevados, talvez o dobro e em alguns casos o triplo”, alerta Arlindo Oliveira. Portugal tem alguma capacidade de atração, “mas o tratamento dos vistos de imigração continua a ser muito difícil“, lamenta o presidente do INESC. “Recebemos muitos pedidos de iranianos, mas é um sarilho. Vai demorar quase um ano até legalizar”.
Courtesy of Derek Thompson; BI
Derek Thompson writes and talks about a lot of things.
But some things pay better than others: "Dimes for analysis, dollars for facts, and Benjamins for facts about artificial intelligence," he tells me.
Thompson, a longtime Atlantic writer who left to launch his own Substack in 2025, has an avid following — Barack Obama reportedly reads him to stay on top of AI developments.
That following also creates an inherent tension: If he only creates work he knows will have a big audience, it squeezes out other subjects he's passionate about, like the way technology affects the media we consume. Or why he thinks Americans should embrace a pro-building mindset — the subject of "Abundance," the recent book he co-wrote with Ezra Klein.
I talked to Thompson about AI — of course — along with some of his other passions, like why he thinks pro sports are a conspiracy that lets the richest people in the world turn "their already-elevated wealth into exospherically extreme wealth." You can hear our entire conversation on my Channels podcast. The following is an edited excerpt:
Peter Kafka: Perhaps the only thing Americans agree on is data centers — they hate them, and don't want them built in their communities. What is the "Abundance" view on data centers? Could you argue that building them is good for the country — just like building more housing is good?
Derek Thompson: I don't see data centers and houses as being equivalent. I think data centers are houses for chips. Really, they're igloos for chips because they're very, very cold houses.
While I feel incredibly passionate about removing barriers to building housing where people want to live, I feel less passionate about saying we need to make sure that every AI company can site every data center wherever it wants to build it.
There are costs to an economic infrastructure project that leans so heavily into data centers that other modes of construction are being starved for resources. Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard, just published a graph showing that in the last year, while data center construction's up by more than 60%, construction of hospitals is down, construction of offices is down, construction of housing is down, construction of just about everything else that you can name, including manufacturing facilities, is down because data centers are essentially eating the economy and crowding out a lot of other investment.
Am I anti-data centers in the extreme? No. Do I think data centers are just like houses? Absolutely not. I think houses for people are more important to emphasize as a matter of public policy than houses for chips.
Last year, you wrote this great piece about how "Everything is Television," where you argue that it's inevitable that all media becomes video. But you've also said that you've become a video podcaster because your podcast company nudged you to do that. How much of the video push is corporate incentive, and how much is what people want?
My theory is that it's corporate incentives because it's what people want.
Companies have attempted pivoting to video infinity times. But other pivots to video, especially in the last few years, have essentially become the norm. Everyone's podcast goes to YouTube now, or Spotify or Netflix. That suggests to me that the instinct to pivot to video reflected a reasonable corporate interpretation of an underlying consumer reality: that, at the end of the day, what most people want to do with most of their time is sit on a comfortable couch or chair and look at moving images.
There does seem to be something spookily, biologically inherent about the degree to which we want to just watch moving images. Television went from zero to 50% adoption rate in a decade.
There is just something true, with a capital T, about the media success of a technology that allows us to do nothing but turn our minds into a receiver for moving images. I'm not saying that's good. I'm just saying that apparently is the situation.
How has going independent changed how you work and what you make?
When you go from being a salaried employee, where you make one amount of money all year, no matter what, to being self-employed, where the line goes up the harder you work, it's very hard to ignore that signal and not work harder.
I feel more harried about work than I did. When that line doesn't go up, when it starts to slip, when 12 months has elapsed since a big article I wrote last year, and because 10% to 20% of subscribers are gonna drop out of the list, it sucks to see any number go down. And then I start to think, "God, I gotta work harder. I gotta get that next article to make the revenue line go back up."
Are you more inclined to think, "That story about sports billionaires did well, let's do more of those," in a way you might have been insulated from at The Atlantic?
Yeah, there's no question. And again, this is not something I think is altogether good. I said one thing I've learned from a year on Substack is that it's dimes for analysis, dollars for facts, and Benjamins for facts about artificial intelligence.
Recognizing that it's dimes for social analysis and Benjamins for AI analysis, there is a part of the job that pulls me toward writing more about AI than I might ...
Because the market wants it.
The market clearly wants it. That said, I do think artificial intelligence is not only the most important but also the most interesting story in the world. It's an economic story. It's a safety story. It's a stock story.
I have this long list of essentially social essays that I want to write. Stuff like "Everything Is Television." But I know that if I only write those essays for a month, if I only write those essays for a year, the line's gonna go down.
And so I'm interested in AI, and fortunately, the AI stuff sells. The AI reporting that I do creates a zone of extraordinary comfort for me to spend time writing stories that I know won't make money, but I think could be really, really broadly read as social analysis.
Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images
For years, Netflix has been telling investors how excited it is about its move into video games.
More recently, it has also started talking up its move into podcasts.
But when the company released its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday, the streamer had nothing to say about either foray.
What does that mean? Netflix won't say. But I'm pretty comfortable coming up with my own conclusion: Netflix doesn't think games or podcasts are going to do much for its business, at least in the near future.
That also tracks with new reporting from The Wall Street Journal, which says that Netflix has recently "stopped pushing games and podcasts, focusing more on its core movie and TV offerings."
That's logical, given the most pressing problem the company has: figuring out how to make movies and TV shows that attract new subscribers, and that get its existing subscribers to spend more time on the service.
But it's also a real turnaround, at least in its messaging.
Netflix has consistently talked up games since it launched that business in 2021. In 2022, cofounder Reed Hastings predicted that Netflix would eventually "be a big leader in games." And the company has frequently pointed out its ambitions in its quarterly updates to investors.
Last quarter, for instance, the company highlighted a new World Cup game, and an app for kids games, and said it had "increasing confidence that we are building a foundation with exciting future growth potential."
It has also spent the last two quarters talking up its move into podcasts. In April, it said podcasts were a "potential incremental engagement opportunity." Three months later, it told investors that podcasts were good because they gave viewers more reasons to watch the service during the day (as opposed to the evening, where half of its viewing happens) and on mobile phones.
But on Tuesday, it had nothing to say about either category, other than a single legalese mention about forward-looking statements. But it did make a reference to other people's video games: It said a 27-minute trailer for Take-Two's highly anticipated "Grand Theft Auto VI," which it showed exclusively for a six-hour window, had been a hit.
Both games and podcasts make a certain kind of sense for Netflix, in theory: The company has often talked about the fact that gaming is a big competitor for its viewers' time. So why not try to harvest some of that attention for itself? And video podcasts are really just another term for "talk shows on a budget" — so why not offer those up to viewers as well?
The flip side: It's been hard to understand how Netflix would be able to create games that are better or more popular than everyone else in the game business. And it's an open question whether viewers who turn to Netflix in search of distracting entertainment would be interested in low-fi chats.
Maybe both categories eventually turn into something meaningful for Netflix one day. But the company seems to be saying that won't happen anytime soon.
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