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Trust In Science Falls Fastest Among Those Left Behind
Poor access to healthcare, limited local influence over research priorities, and an unequal distribution of scientific benefits are undermining public
Kakao Entertainment strikes K-pop partnership with Warner’s Atlantic Music Group to develop artists ‘from the
The two companies will work together on global strategy, music production, distribution, marketing, and promotion for K-pop artists.
WTFN Merges Fred Media & Digital Arm Radar To Form Studios Business
Australian producer WTFN Group has pulled together TV distribution arm Fred Media and digital division Radar to form an integrated studios operations.
Greenwich Entertainment Buys Philip Byron’s ‘Spin Wars’
EXCLUSIVE: Spin Wars, a documentary about the billion-dollar boutique fitness revolution, has landed a buyer. Greenwich Entertainment has acquired the North American distribution rights to the doc, wh...
Starz Entertainment LLC (STRZ) Restores STARZ on Verizon Fios Under New Distribution Deal
Starz Entertainment LLC reached a new distribution agreement with Verizon Fios, restoring all STARZ channels, STARZ On Demand and the STARZ app for Fios subscribers.Material DetailsContext by AI AnalystThis is a mid-cycle distribution recovery, reinstating a key MVPD partner after prior carriage lo…
Box truck slams through the side of Ambridge distribution business
Photos from the scene show heavy damage to the building and the truck.
Radial Entertainment, Content Partners Announce 20 New Episodes of Legacy True Crime Series 'Forensic Files'
Content Partners and Radial Entertainment Oct. 14 announced 20 new episodes of the landmark true crime series “Forensic Files.” Building on their existing distribution relationship, the companies will jointly finance the new season and share oversight of production, with Radial handling worldwide distribution. ITV America, part of ITV Studios, will produce the episodes. ITV America … Continue reading "Radial Entertainment, Content Partners Announce 20 New Episodes of Legacy True Crime Series ‘Forensic Files’"
Toon2Tango to Lead Global Licensing and Merchandising for Mediawan Kids & Family Slate, Including Titles Like ‘Astro Boy’ Reboot (EXCLUSIVE)
Mediawan Kids & Family, Europe’s leading independent studio for the production and distribution of children’s and family content, and Toon2Tango, the German kids and family entertainment powerhouse, h...
AENT Surges As Alliance Entertainment Earnings Spark 46% Jump
Alliance Entertainment Holding Corporation stocks have been trading up by 9.53 percent amid heightened optimism from strong distribution growth news What Traders Need To Know Alliance Entertainment reported fiscal 2026 revenue up 8% to $1.15B, with gross margin expanding 80 bps to 13.3% and
Who Won August and September: Original Films or Franchises?
(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.) I just heard someone say that if you’re reading a pundit or data analyst, and they don’t tell you that they got anything wrong, they’re not a pundit but an “influencer”. I agree with that. You have to tell your audience when you get things wrong, or they won’t (or shouldn’t) trust you as much. Today, we’ve got another edition of “What I Got Right, What I Got Wrong”. In general, I’m patting myself on the back (and patting very hard) about a few things like IP at the box office, LIV golf, horror films, crowdfunding movies, superheroes, and old people going to the theaters. That said, I also made a couple of data mistakes on the streaming bubble popping and HBO’s datecdotes, so I’m not perfect. But first, I need your feedback... Subscribe Follow-Ups: What Should We Call Mid-Budget Movies Which Aren’t Cinematic Enough for Theaters But Are Too Expensive to Make Money on Streaming? After I asked for feedback on what we should call straight-to-streaming films that are too big to pencil out on streaming but not really big enough to resonate in theaters, I got some great suggestions from you all, including... “Moldilocks” from John Aboud “Little Big Indie” from Travis Frick1 “Midflicks” from Jonathan Funke. “Extra-Medium” from Jona Nwuke. (Read the explanation in the footnote.) Between these and Brandon Katz—who suggested “Bermuda Budget Triangle”, “The Platform Gap” and “The Distribution Deadzone”—we’ve got some excellent suggestions. And they’re better than my suggestion, the “Streaming Budget Dead Zone”, so let’s take a poll! The winning entry becomes the new term. Loading... RIGHT: LIV Golf is Fully Bankrupt…Is Anyone Else Next? A few years ago, I was always a bit perplexed at all the articles I’d read praising LIV Golf and their strategy to disrupt the PGA. LIV Golf, a brand new professional golf league, offered PGA stars ten times what they made on the PGA Tour to join their new league. And folks praised this strategy for its initial “success” in that a lot of big names did indeed leave the PGA. Yeah, of course the players came over. LIV Golf paid them so, so, so much more! But LIV Golf hadn’t discovered a way to increase potential revenue. So think about this in basic business terms… They paid much more in costs… …but had no real way to increase revenue. That’s not a strategy! That’s deficit financing. It won’t work unless you bankrupt the competition (and then turn around and pay those same golfers much, much less). It’s not a sustainable strategy and only lasts as long as the company/person/nation backing it decides they’re cool with losing money. For LIV Golf, that meant Middle East oil wealth, in particular Saudi Arabian money. Clearly, the current Iran War has hurt Middle East finances, so they need to trim their more exorbitant spending. And LIV Golf was part of that trimming. This should be a major warning for others. TGL’s parent company, TMRW Sports, just got a $1 billion valuation, despite TGL’s (the indoor golf league) horrible TV viewership of less than half a million viewers per match. Unrivaled, the women’s basketball league, just secured a $650 valuation, despite its horrible TV viewership and a new rival (Project B) entering the scene next year. To relate this to streaming, Hollywood should ask which streamers may have wealthy patrons funding their losses. (Let’s be clear: Google, Amazon and Apple.) Could those patrons lose their appetite? For Amazon, probably not. But Apple has a new boss, so maybe! WRONG: My Analysis of the Streaming Bubble Was Missing a Week I’m going to be congratulating myself a lot today, but I make mistakes too, like this data goof. When I last compiled the data on the decline in TV shows, I was missing one week at the end of June. If you look at the first image, you can see that one week was mislabelled as “July”. Mainly, this image got updated to show a 27% decline, not 29%: This change doesn’t really impact the overall analysis, but it is two percent better. By the way, through the third quarter, the decline increased and it’s now a 30% decrease since 2022. (I’ll write/visualize this in an upcoming article.) But I want you to trust me and my data. Especially these days, when many people are using LLMs that I know are inserting faulty data into their charts, I want to keep earning my audience’s faith. So that’s the accurate data. RIGHT: IP Remains Very, Very Popular In July, I wrote a giant (and I mean giant) article on Backrooms, Obsession, and the box office, going over what we know, what we don’t know about what works in theaters, looking at YouTubers, IP, the horror genre, comic book movies, and a whole lot more. The month of August really tested a lot of my theses and, being honest, mostly supported my arguments. Let’s start with IP. Looking at 8-Aug (the weekend after Spider-Man: Brand New Day came out) to 18-Sep (the weekend that Resident Evil came out, which I think provides a nice bookend to this time period), there were seven films based on pre-existing IP: Resident Evil (2026) ($126 million) Practical Magic 2 ($65 million) _Insidious: Out of the Furthe_r ($65 million) Coyote Vs. Acme ($59 million) Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie ($53 million) Tony ($15 million) Super Troopers 3 ($7 million) Compare those to the notable original films from the past month—I actually could have included more movies, but here are just thirteen, bringing us to an even twenty films—including.... The End of Oak Street ($54 million) Buddy ($26 million) Mutiny ($15 million) By Any Means ($15 million) The Dog Stars ($14 million) Runner ($14 million) One Night Only ($11 million) Hope ($8 million) Spa Weekend ($7 million) The Uprising ($6 million) Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma ($6 million) Onslaught ($3 million) Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man ($2.8 million) Here’s that in chart form: Five of the top six films in this time period were all based on IP. I made a big chart of films that grossed over $200 million at the box office before Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey hit theaters. Let’s update that chart! By the way, if you want to see how I categorized each film—so another bar chart—here it is: I know that many of my fellow critics/pundits/analysts dislike films based on IP and how Hollywood is making so many of them. And I’m sympathetic to this point of view. As I’ve written many, many times before, you need a balance between existing franchises, new IP, and original films. And Hollywood clearly needs to make more films like Resident Evil (a well-made film from a visionary director) and fewer Practical Magic 2’s (which didn’t get critical or customer buzz). But at some point, critics and pundits need to contend with what audiences are telling them: Movie-goers aren’t showing up to original films. Audiences are speaking with their dollars, telling you they want more IP and franchises. You can try to convince studio heads to make fewer IP-based films and franchises, but the data and numbers aren’t there. Instead, critics need to work harder to convince audiences to show up for original films. Aim your ire/concern at the average person, not studio heads.2 Because they’re just making the films that audiences are telling them to make. WRONG: Original Horror Films Didn’t Break Out I’ll be honest, even though I wrote an article casting some skepticism on the horror genre in July, if you asked me to make a prediction, I would have predicted that, in August, a new, original horror film would have blown up. No, seriously, I just assumed that Obsession and Backrooms presaged a change in audience behavior. But none of the buzzy new original horror films from August—Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Onslaught (not an action film in spite of the ads), The End of Oak Street, Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man, or _Buddy—_broke out. To be clear, exactly one of those films (Buddy) had good “ROI”, but again—I try to be specific in my language—none were “popular” in any broad sense of the word. None of them will be “saving” movies theaters like Backrooms or _Obsession_helped save the summer. The new Insidious film and Resident Evil, both based on IP, were far and away the biggest horror films since July. (We’ll see if this changes in October/Halloween season.) RIGHT: Stay Skeptical about Crowdfunding... I’ve long been skeptical about crowd-investing platforms as one of Hollywood’s saviors, mainly because there’s so much hype/buzz. People need to stay more skeptical about more things, explaining both the potential upside but also the downsides. In particular, the media often hypes crowdfunding at the start and never checks in on the actual results after they’ve come in later. And August gave us our first update! _Ice Cream Man—_directed by Eli Roth—grossed $6 million off of a $5.5 million budget. This is a production of The Horror Section, which was one of the first “crowd investing” studios with 2,400 investors, which means that 2,400 investors probably lost money. They certainly aren’t getting as great of returns as if they had just invested their dollars in the stock market. Hopefully Stiletto (Tagline: “Someone’s Going to Make it Rain Blood!”) does better next month. WRONG: Another Data Goof Here’s another data error. When the first episode of House of the Dragon came out, HBO put out that it had 21.5 million viewers in the first three days, and I read that to mean in the US…but no, it was global. So my US-only datecdotes charts shouldn’t have included it. We never got US-only numbers for the first episode, but for the final episode, HBO put out that it had 11 million US viewers. (And that global dropped to 21 million viewers.) Here’s the updated chart (which I’ve since used in the Streaming Ratings Report): Still, this show is absolutely huge. RIGHT: Superhero Films Remain Very, Very Popular After Supergirl flopped, I read a few takes that “comic book movies are going the way of the Western”. Post-Spider-Man: Brand New Day, that take didn’t age well. To be fair, I have a very nuanced take on the superhero genre right now; it’s down right now, for a lot of reasons. But it’s not “dead”. Maybe _Spider-_Man is just a really popular character? I saw that take, and it’s a fair counter-argument. (But pundits arguing that superhero movies were dead should have mentioned this $1.5 billion counter-argument…) But is it just Spider-Man? The next Avengers film already has $50 million in pre-sales (and I was skeptical that that film would do well) and the Avengers: End Game re-release topped the box office two weekends ago (over three original films). And I wouldn’t bet against Batman or Superman. So maybe it’s just Spider-Man, Batman, Superman and the Avengers. Oh, and Deadpool, of course. And Black Panther. And Wolverine. And probably the X-Men. Plus a well-made Wonder Woman or the Hulk film could break out. But that’s it! It’s just those ten characters/teams. Oh, what’s that? Lanterns is also doing well on HBO? (See previous section…) To be fair, I’m actually pretty sympathetic to the argument that more popular characters—like Spider-Man and Batman—anchor more popular films. In fact, I made that exact argument three years ago when I first wrote about the “Marvel-cession”. In many ways, you can blame The Guardians of the Galaxy for fooling Marvel Studios (and the rest of us) into believing that any character could pop. It turns out, the list of iconic characters is probably smaller than most people think. But it’s probably too early to say that superhero films and comic book movies are dead unless “death” means a slight decline over a longtime. RIGHT: Who Killed Theaters? Old People I get frustrated whenever I see headlines or analysis about how young people are “returning” to theaters. As I’ve detailed(for years), young people have always powered the US box office, despite narratives about “kids these days” and their “phones”. Really, what’s changed post-2020/pandemic is that old people aren’t going to the movies nearly as much. This summer, I saw a movie (from an older director) in a theater near a retirement community, and multiple older people at the theater were talking about how this was their first time seeing a movie in years. I dislike personal anecdotes, so YouGov can fill in the data, best summarized by this headline: “Who killed movie theaters? Not the youths”. According to them, 64% of people aged 18-29 have seen a movie in the last year, but only 30% of 65-and-older. 20% of 18-29 have seen a movie in theaters in the last week and 42% in the last month. Here’s the polling data: Most concerning? Many Americans (17%) think theaters are a worse or much worse experience than watching films at home. Slight WRONG: Hadestown Opens Big A live theater capture of the Broadway musical, Hadestown, made $20 million at the US box office, which begs the question: was I wrong to be skeptical about musicals a few years ago? Yes and no. On the one hand, $20 million is a far cry from being “popular”, so yeah, the genre isn’t that popular overall and Hadestown is one of the more popular musicals from recent years (i.e. the “Taylor Swift Data Fallacy” in action). On the other, I doubt filming this cost all that much, and I don’t think that they spent much on marketing, so this is a good source of ancillary revenue. Smaller Updates WRONG: As I mentioned in a Streaming Ratings Report, I underestimated the budget for Enola Holmes 3. It probably cost more like $50 million, if not more. But... I’m not sure that it really matters? At sub-10 million hours, prices have to come down to make this work. WRONG: Netflix is giving Ink a 27-day in theaters! To quote the kids/YouTubers these days, let’s go! Now I might actually have a chance to see Danny Boyle’s latest in theaters. I’d complained about this in a “Coming Soon” section, but I was heartened to read that Netflix is giving multiple films longer theatrical windows this year. RIGHT: Netflix is sending 4-5 films per year to theaters. Netflix is slowly but surely sending more and more films to theaters, as I cautiously predicted earlier this year. For now, it’s just three big films and a number of awards contenders, but still, this is great news. And they’ll be releasing box office grosses! Just this week, Ted Sarandos confirmed that KPop Demon Hunters 2 will come to theaters (and my guess is it performs in the box office top ten at a minimum). WRONG: Angel has 3 million subscribers! How do I know this? Well, they told Deadline, who reported it. I marked this as “wrong”, since they’ve doubled their subscribers in one year but, you know, they don’t really have a hit film to speak of and they’re still losing money. WRONG: Furious was only renewed for one more season. I accidentally wrote “two more seasons” in my latest “Renewals, Cancellations, Un-Orders and Removals Update”. RIGHT: House of David is ending with its third season. In July, Prime Video renewed House of David for a third season, as I just wrote in my latest “Renewals and Cancellations” report. Well, now it’s ending after that third season. Why? As I’ve been writing, its viewership wasn’t great. I got feedback that this show didn’t cost very much, but it cost enough that its limited viewership didn’t save it. WRONG: Adults was a Hulu original! So I missed Adults when it first came out last year; I saw that it aired on FX and just assumed that it was a linear-first program. Turns out, it aired three episodes on FX, but binge-released the rest of its episodes the next day on Hulu. Huh. So I should have covered it last year! But I just wrote about it. 1 “When I was a kid in the 90s, if you wore a t-shirt to school that wasn’t too big and also wasn’t too small, but somehow didn’t quite fit, we’d say you were wearing an “extra-medium” shirt.” 2 As always, a huge exception is Disney, which barely makes anything original anymore.
Kerry Yu Achieves Recognition for Expertise and Contributions to the Field of Fashion, Modeling, and Entertainment Production
September 8, 2026 -- Kerry Yu recognized for 30 years in fashion design and apparel management
Cosmos Health's Brands Reach More Than 40 Countries Across Europe, the Middle East, North America and Asia, Addressing Global Markets Estimated at Approximately $946 Billion
The portfolio comprises more than 15 proprietary brands and product lines and 10 branded generics across five product categories, sold in more than 40 countries through pharmacies, hospitals, retail chains and e-commerce. It is manufactured at GMP-certified facilities in Europe and the United States and supported by the Company's services in contract manufacturing, pharmaceutical distribution, telehealth and research and development.
Why Science Communication Is Breaking Down, and How Philanthropy Can Fix It
A Milken Institute team argues that the biomedical communication pipeline is breaking down at publication, distribution, and public engagement, and that philanthropy is uniquely positioned to repair it.
Theresa Porcaro Celebrated for Leadership in Healthcare Marketing and Women's Health Advocacy
September 8, 2026 -- Theresa Marie Porcaro is lauded for her contributions as a leading executive at Pelvic Rehabilitation Medicine
Science on Target: Q3 Publications from our Innovation Ecosystem
Antisense Oligonucleotide Tofersen Distribution in the Central Nervous System of SOD1-ALS Autopsy Tissue Donors. Guise AJ, Sellon MT, Roemer SF, Monine M, Comfort Harris NT, […] Plowey ED. JAMA Neurol. 2026 Jul 6:e262195. doi: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2026.2195. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 42406382; PMCID: PMC13338845. Using human 3D organoid models to gain mechanistic insight in motor neuron […]
Bexar County commissioners back BAMC amid Methodist Healthcare's plans for Level II trauma center
The Bexar County Commissioners Court unanimously approved a resolution Tuesday reaffirming its support for Brooke Army Medical Center’s role in regional trauma care. The vote comes as Methodist Healthcare seeks designation as a Level II trauma facility — a move the court says could affect trauma case distribution and jeopardize BAMC’s mission without coordinated regional assessment.
Tecsys Pledges $5 Million to Prisma Health's New Behavioral Health Hospital
/PRNewswire/ -- Tecsys Inc. (TSX: TCS), a leading provider of supply chain management solutions for healthcare and distribution, announced today a $5 million...
Lil’ Drug Store Products acquires Navajo’s Health, Beauty and Wellness business
Lil’ Drug Store Products, Inc. (LDSP), based in Cedar Rapids, announced the completed acquisition of Navajo Incorporated‘s Health, Beauty, and Wellness business. The acquisition was completed Sept. 4, according to a release. Opened in 1974, the family-owned Lil’ Drug Store Products provides distribution, category management, and brand partnerships across various retail channels such as health […]
Tutta Bella scales back restaurants as it shifts focus to wholesale business
Tutta Bella closes multiple Seattle-area locations to focus on wholesale pizza production through its Kroger distribution deal.
Lil’ Drug Store Products acquires Navajo’s Health, Beauty and Wellness business
Lil’ Drug Store Products, Inc. (LDSP), based in Cedar Rapids, announced the completed acquisition of Navajo Incorporated‘s Health, Beauty, and Wellness business. The acquisition was completed Sept. 4, according to a release. Opened in 1974, the family-owned Lil’ Drug Store Products provides distribution, category management, and brand partnerships across various retail channels such as health […]
UBS says its China fund distribution unit will cease business
UBS said on Thursday its China fund distribution unit in the tech hub of Shenzhen would cease fund sales business from the end of September.
Tecsys Pledges $5 Million to Prisma Health's New Behavioral Health Hospital
Tecsys Inc. (TSX: TCS), a leading provider of supply chain management solutions for health care and distribution, announced a $5 million pledge to support the new Prisma Health Behavioral Health Hospital in Upstate South Carolina. The gift,...
Kakao Entertainment partners with Atlantic Music Group to expand K-pop globally
The companies will collaborate on global strategy, production, distribution and promotion for K-pop artists.
Pocket Entertainment: Interview With Co-Founder And CEO Rohan Nayak About AI-Powered Storytelling And The Single-Person Studio
Pocket Entertainment is building an entertainment ecosystem that connects storytelling, creation, production, distribution, localization, and audience engagement. The company operates Pocket FM, its flagship serialized audio drama platform, and has expanded into short-form visual entertainment through Pocket Saga while developing AI tools such as Sherpa that helps creators develop ideas and build characters, worlds, story arcs and episodes. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Pocket Entertainment Co-Founder and CEO Rohan Nayak to learn more about the company’s origins, its evolution beyond audio entertainment, and how AI could enable individual creators to build global entertainment franchises.
AirJoule: Exciting Science, Decent Acquisition, But No Revenue Yet
AirJoule’s acquisition of BitSink adds $11M revenue and data center cooling distribution.
Did New Film Unit Just Shift AMC Stock’s Investment Narrative?
AMC Entertainment Holdings recently launched Leawood Films, a film distribution unit based in Los Angeles and Leawood, Kansas, aiming to bring more small and mid-sized movies into theatres worldwide while relying on fully financed projects to limit production risk. The new distributor uses AMC’s excess screen capacity and past concert-film marketing experience to secure theatrical placement for filmmakers who might otherwise struggle to find backing, while leaving most downstream revenue and...
Altrova Health Announces Proposed Debt Settlement
NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWS WIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATESToronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - September 16, 2026) - Altrova Health Inc. (CSE: ROVA) (OTCQB: ATVHF) (FSE: WF8) ("Altrova Health" or the "Company") announces that it proposes to enter into debt settlement agreements with three consultants to settle aggregate indebtedness of C$215,000 through the issuance of an aggregate of 3,583,333 common shares of the Company ("Common Shares") at a deemed...
Chubb names digital distribution chief for small commercial
Jennifer Burnham will lead Marketplace and API channel expansion for independent agents
Fox Entertainment Partners With Hartbeat for Vertical IP Development, Distribution
The new partnership gives Fox first look at films and TV series developed from select Hartbeat labels' microseries.
Sauer Brands offloads spice business to Watkins
Watkins will secure the branding and distribution rights for spices and seasonings under the Kernel Season’s, Spice Hunter and Sauer’s brands.
Rising Tide Distributors, Inc.
Rising Tide Distributors, Inc. is a New York-based wine and spirits distribution company founded by Nicole Lyons with a mission to create greater access, opportunity and visibility for emerging brands, with a particular commitment to brands led by diverse founders and women.
RWJBarnabas Health and Local Elected Officials Partner for Food Distribution Event
In September at the Cherry Blossom Welcome Center in Essex County Branch Brook Park, RWJBarnabas Health and Clara Maass Medical Center joined Senator Teresa Ruiz, Assemblywoman Eliana Pintor Marin, Assemblywoman Shanique Speight, Assemblywoman Carmen Morales and Assemblyman Michael Venezia to distribute 180 boxes filled with healthy produce, eggs, bread and more to community members.
CVS Health (CVS) Stock May Trade Below Fair Value On Integrated Care Push
CVS Health has delivered a 37.5% share price gain over the past three years, which puts fresh attention on a simple question. Is the current US$87.95 price tag adequately explained by the earnings power investors are paying for today? The 37.5% return over three years means anyone buying now needs to judge whether that past performance has already reflected what the business is earning. Recent developments, from extended distribution agreements with Cardinal Health and McKesson to regulatory...
Inside Amer Sports: Making and moving the product
Follow Amer Sports products from manufacturing in Romania to distribution in Germany, powered by skilled people, precise processes, and technology.
SalesFocus Solutions Announces Sam Go as Director of Business Development and Strategy
/PRNewswire/ -- SalesFocus Solutions (SFS), provider of the MARS Distribution Intelligence Platform for the asset management industry, today announced that Sam...
New guided search tool helps Kentuckians navigate treatment, mental health and recovery resources
By Leah Dick University of Kentucky Finding the right support for substance use disorder treatment, mental health care, recovery housing or naloxone distribution can be an important step toward better…
How Extending CVS Distribution Through 2032 At Cardinal Health (CAH) Has Changed Its Investment Story
In October 2026, Cardinal Health announced it had entered into a binding Letter of Intent to extend its existing distribution agreement with CVS Health through June 30, 2032, maintaining the current scope of distribution services. This long‑dated extension reinforces the durability of Cardinal Health’s core distribution relationships, underscoring the importance of scale partnerships in its business model. We’ll now explore how the extended CVS distribution agreement through 2032 may...
Layoffs and business closures loom as tens of thousands of skill games become illegal
Joe Rocca’s business effectively ended Wednesday as the enforcement of Pennsylvania’s skill games ban began. Rocca, owner of Rite Touch Distribution...
7SEAS ENTERTAINMENT SHIFTS INTO HIGHER GEAR WITH "FORMULA RIDE"
October 13, 2026 -- India-built mobile racing title brings together speed, strategy, career progression and real-time multiplayer for a wider global audience
David Andrew Goodman is Celebrated for Decades of Continued Success in the Entertainment Sector
September 8, 2026 -- David Andrew Goodman is lauded for his contributions in production lighting at Goodman Grip & Light
Why politicians should pay more attention to the polls (reprise)
Welcome to the 231st edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), a polling newsletter that always welcomes new readers. So please don’t keep TWIP a secret; share it with your friends and colleagues: Share The Week in Polls With all the stories swirling around Reform, JL Partners and political polling, I am finally tearing myself away from talking about the regulation of polling this week - and instead re-running a previous piece reminding us why the solution to problems with polls isn’t simply to ban or ignore them. Rather, we need them to play a vital role in making our politics - and politicians - better. This is followed by summaries of the latest national voting intention polls, seat projections from MRPs and the most recent party leader ratings. Subscribers who pay for the full edition can also read ten insights from the latest polls and analyses, including: A trio of organisations and a pair of professors have been casting their eyes over the Liberal Democrats ahead of the party’s autumn conference; What impact did the summer heatwave have on views on climate change? and Which wins out between chocolate and cheese? If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can read all ten by starting a free trial now: Get FREE 7-day trial For more polling news as it comes in ahead of next week’s edition, you can also follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky. Picking up on my doubt last week about whether or not 35% of British train travellers have tried to order a takeaway for delivery to a railway station or carriage, thank you to reader Iain, who has been in touch to say he has done just that… in India. Another quick pair of updates, this time on the controversies around Reform and polling. Politico has a further scoop - “Farage aide caught in donor sting attended Egypt retreat with JL Partners” - and Ian Dunt has written about the problems with polling too: “Seeing the response of many polling experts in the last few weeks suggests that they are nervous about what is happening and keen to mitigate against it. Seeing the response of journalists, which has been basically non-existent, suggests the precise opposite.” My usual reminder as well: please do hit reply if you’ve spotted a poll, focus group or new piece of poll-based research that you think should be in contention for coverage in a future edition. Thank you! And with that, on with the show. How politicians get public opinion wrong I have written before about the benefits that come from widespread availability of high-quality political polling. We need more polls and more good coverage of polls. However, what I’ve not dug into before is the research into how accurately politicians estimate public opinion on issues. Thankfully we have academic research to tell us. First, the bad news: We present results from a study of 866 politicians in four countries.1 Politicians were asked to estimate the percentage of public support for various policy proposals. Comparing more than 10,000 estimations with actual levels of public support, we conclude that politicians are quite inaccurate estimators of people’s preferences. They make large errors and even regularly misperceive what a majority of the voters wants. Politicians are hardly better at estimating public preferences than ordinary citizens. Walgrave, S., Jansen, A., Sevenans, J., Soontjens, K., Pilet, J.B., Brack, N., Varone, F., Helfer, L., Vliegenthart, R., van der Meer, T., Breunig, C., Bailer, S., Sheffer, L. & Loewen, P.J. (2023a), “Inaccurate Politicians: Elected Representatives’ Estimations of Public Opinion in Four Countries”, The Journal of Politics, 85(1): 209-222. The bad news is not quite as bad as that makes it sound because, when asked whether the majority of public opinion was for or against various policies, politicians picked the wrong option ‘only’ 29% of the time. However, this included getting it wrong even when public opinion is far from evenly split on an issue: They do not only get it wrong when the public is divided and hard to read (e.g., when there is a 51%:49% distribution). Seventy percent of the misplacements occur for policies with a relatively clear distribution of at least 60% (dis)agreeing citizens. Moreover, the public scored only slightly worse than politicians, picking the wrong option 2.7 out of 8 times on average, compared with 2.3 times for politicians. Turning to the other measure of accuracy (not which side is in the lead but what the percentage support is for each side), politicians on average were 18 percentage points out in their guesses. Again, this was only slightly better than the public, whose error came in at 21 percentage points.2 Further research, using the same mix of countries, gives a little more comfort about how (in)accurate perceptions are: We show that politicians have a better understanding of public opinion when they think the issue matters to voters. Further, when an issue is personally important to politicians they more accurately estimate their party supporters’ opinions. The results confirm that politicians hold more accurate perceptions of voters’ preferences when they think it is important to do so but not necessarily when the issues actually are important to voters. Butler, C., Walgrave, S., Soontjens, K. & Loewen, P.J. (2024), “Politicians are better at estimating public opinion when they think it is more salient”, Party Politics: 1–13. Even so, it’s not a good picture. The remedy for this? Politicians should spend more time reading the polls. So forward this newsletter to someone you know… Share For a more general argument against banning polls, see my 2024 piece. Is “Let Bartlet Be Bartlet” good advice or not? The latest episode of my Political Fictions podcast heads across the Atlantic for a dip into one of the political TV classics: Mark and Cory talk about a giant of American political drama for the first time this week, as they tackle The West Wing. They talk about Let Bartlet Be Bartlet, the nineteenth episode of series one. In it, Mark wonders if The West Wing is actually the epitome of the “Boris Johnson school of politics”, Cory outmanoeuvres Mark into confirming we will record a Christmas Special about Love, Actually and they debate whether the central message of this episode has been misunderstood. Cory’s email newsletter is Paperback Rioter and Mark has a family of email newsletters. Subscribe to our newsletter for some additional bonus content and to get alerted whenever a new episode comes out. Our theme tune is “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” by Kevin MacLeod/incompetech.com and licensed under the Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. You can also listen to our episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the web or YouTube. Elsewhere from me… [ A Lord's Eye View How to fix the problem of money in our politics Welcome to my latest update on work in the House of Lords. This time I am taking a look at how our political system is regulated, and the protections we need to keep democracy safe from becoming simply a contest to see who has the biggest bank account… Read more 5 days ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Mark Pack ](https://lordseyeview.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-the-problem-of-money-in?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web&embedding_publication_id=1269283) If you spot a factual error… Borrowing an idea from Stuart Ritchie and others, if you spot a factual error in an edition of this newsletter, I will give you a free 12-month subscription to the paid-for version (or an extra 12 months on your existing one). Factual errors qualify, but grammatical errors or disagreements over interpretation do not, and my decision is final. Messages about both of those are always welcome, though. Voting intention and leadership ratings Here are the latest voting intention polls from different pollsters. It is all pretty static at the moment, with a small and consistent Labour lead in nearly all the polls. The table is also online here, along with explanations about what is included. It is updated regularly throughout the week as new polls are released. Next are the seat projections from MRPs, also sorted by fieldwork dates, listing those which are based on dedicated fieldwork (rather than models based on averages of other polls). Because such MRPs are published infrequently, some of the entries below are quite old. Finally, here is a summary of leadership ratings, with a graph from PollCheck: Detailed numbers from the latest polls are online here, and both that and the graph are updated regularly throughout the week as new data comes out. For historical figures on both voting intention and leader approval stretching back to the 1930s, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase. Catch up on the previous two editions [ ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/a-crisis-point-for-political-polling) [ A crisis point for political polling Sep 13 ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/a-crisis-point-for-political-polling) [ Read full story ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/a-crisis-point-for-political-polling) [ ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/extra-questions-about-the-polls-in) [ Extra questions about the polls in Reform’s funding scandal Sep 6 ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/extra-questions-about-the-polls-in) [ Read full story ](https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/extra-questions-about-the-polls-in) My privacy policy and other legal information are available here. Links to purchase books or other items are usually affiliate links which pay a commission for each sale. Quotes from social media messages are occasionally lightly edited for punctuation and clarity. If you are subscribed to other email lists of mine, please note that unsubscribing from this one will not automatically remove you from the others. If you wish to be removed from all my lists, simply reply to this email to let me know. A quintet of Lib Dem polling analyses, and 9 other polling insights you shouldn’t miss The following ten findings from the most recent polls and analyses are only for subscribers who pay for the full edition, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away. Ahead of the start of Liberal Democrat conference, we have a trio of organisations and a pair of professors with pieces out about Ed Davey’s party:
Why Sphere Entertainment (SPHR) Stock Is Trading Lower Today
Shares of content production and distribution company Sphere Entertainment (NYSE:SPHR) fell 12.3% in the afternoon session after Craig-Hallum analyst Ryan Sigdahl downgraded the stock from Buy to Hold and reduced the price target to $132 from $170. According to TipRanks, Sigdahl pointed to demand for The Wizard of Oz at Sphere fading faster than expected. The firm cut its estimates to reflect that weaker outlook and lowered its price target to $132 from $170. A reduced target on the show that ha
Jiang Feng: The Unravelling of German & European Politics
A state election in eastern Germany has become a revealing test of the changing political landscapes of Germany and Europe, writes Jiang Feng, Professor and Chairman of the Council of the Shanghai Academy of Global Governance and Area Studies (SAGGAS) at Shanghai International Studies University. His analysis follows the decisive victory of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) (which has been classified as right-wing extremist by German authorities)in the state of Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September, in which it finished far ahead of its mainstream rivals. Jiang previously served as Minister-Counsellor at the Chinese Embassy in Berlin. The following article was published on 8 September 2026 on huanqiu.com, the online platform of the Global Times. On 6 September, the results of the state election in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, were announced. The Alternative for Germany (AfD), classified as far-right by German authorities, made history by becoming the largest party in the state parliament, winning 43.8 per cent of the vote — twice its share in the previous election. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which had governed the state continuously for 24 years, won just 17.2 per cent, its worst result ever in Saxony-Anhalt. On the night the results were announced, the atmosphere at the CDU gathering was unusually calm. There was neither shock nor argument, as if the defeat had long been expected. Several veteran party members who had spent years working in the state government said: “Defeat is not a bad thing. It is time to make changes.” This state election has not only upended Saxony-Anhalt’s political landscape, but also laid bare the deep tensions between Germany’s traditional party structure and model of governance, on the one hand, and an increasingly polarised society on the other. Its repercussions are already being felt at the federal level, making Saxony-Anhalt a useful case study of the broader trend towards political polarisation and realignment in Europe. Governing Difficulties after Electoral Victory The most immediate consequence of the election is a historic setback for the mainstream party order that took shape in post-war Germany. In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD has leapt from a peripheral party to the largest political force in the state. Its electoral base has expanded beyond the traditional category of “marginal protest voters” to take on the characteristics of a cross-class coalition. The party has not only consolidated its support in rural areas, but also attracted many middle-class voters and even members of the social elite with stable jobs, their own homes, and substantial incomes. It has thus evolved from a “protest party” into one with the potential to govern. Despite its commanding lead in the vote, however, the AfD faces an institutional obstacle to governing the state: the mainstream parties’ long-standing “firewall” against it. Neither of the two potential routes to forming a government appears likely to break the current political deadlock. The first would be a coalition of establishment parties, led by the CDU and bringing together the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Greens, the Left Party (Die Linke) and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) in a cross-camp government. In terms of parliamentary arithmetic, such a coalition could prevent the AfD from forming a government and preserve the outward stability of the traditional political order. Yet these parties are fundamentally divided over key issues including immigration, the energy transition, economic management, and cultural and education policy. Coalition negotiations would therefore be extremely difficult, and even if a government could be formed, it would most likely prove short-lived. More importantly, an alliance of establishment parties aimed at keeping the largest party out of government would play directly into the AfD’s narrative that “political elites are suppressing public opinion”. It could deepen perceptions of political unfairness, further strengthening the AfD’s political capital, and creating a dynamic in which “the more it is suppressed, the more people vote for it”. Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s candidate for state premier, has said that if efforts to form a government fail because other parties refuse to cooperate, the AfD will push for a fresh election, which he believes could deliver the party an absolute majority of seats. This points to more intense political battles ahead. The second option would be a coalition between the AfD and the BSW. Together, the two parties would command a simple majority in parliament, making this, on paper, the quickest route to forming a government. The BSW is the only elected party that has not ruled out cooperation with the AfD, and the two parties share some common ground, including on policy towards Russia. There is therefore a degree of political basis for cooperation. Were such a coalition to materialise, Germany would see its first state government jointly formed by a party defined as far-right and one with a far-left background, creating what might be called a “bipolar anti-establishment alliance”. Such an outcome would fundamentally break with the ideological boundaries of post-war German party politics. It is worth noting that even if the AfD ultimately fails to enter the state government, its roughly 47 per cent share of parliamentary seats would give it a powerful blocking minority. Without its consent, major decisions requiring a two-thirds majority — including constitutional amendments, significant budgetary adjustments, and state-level institutional reforms — would be extremely difficult to pass. Therefore, whoever ultimately forms the government, the AfD will be an unavoidable force in Saxony-Anhalt politics, with a direct influence on the state’s legislative process. Systemic Failures in Germany’s Governance Model The Saxony-Anhalt election result reflects a systemic failure of Germany’s post-war mainstream-party model of governance to adapt to rapidly changing socioeconomic conditions. It stems from multiple, mutually reinforcing structural tensions and highlights the existing political system’s difficulty in adapting to “an increasingly polarised society First, collective anxiety has replaced individual material hardship as a central driver of political mobilisation. The rise of the AfD can no longer be explained simply by poverty or social marginalisation. Its increasingly cross-class electoral base suggests that what is driving voters towards the party is, above all, concern about the broader direction of society. This anxiety about the future of the political community goes beyond individual gains and losses. In political discourse, economic anxiety has become closely intertwined with immigration, while immigration and refugee issues are, in essence, questions of social fairness. This perception turns conflicts over the distribution of social resources into negative assessments of governing parties, providing a broad social basis for far-right political narratives. Second, regional disparities and East German identity have undermined the strategy of addressing eastern Germany’s structural challenges at the regional level. More than three decades after German reunification, eastern states such as Saxony-Anhalt have experienced periods of economic growth, but their underlying economic structures remain weak, and household incomes and wealth remain significantly below those in western Germany. At the same time, they continue to face population outflow, an ageing population, labour shortages, and other structural challenges. At a deeper level, historical experiences — including the collapse of the former East German economic system, mass unemployment during the transition, and the westward shift of decision-making power over major issues — have left some residents with a sense of being “second-class citizens” and of being excluded. For years, the German government treated the “syndrome” of reunification as a regional problem to be gradually addressed at the local level. That approach is becoming increasingly unsustainable, as regional development disparities emerge as a core structural factor shaping national politics. Third, the erosion of institutional trust is perhaps the most decisive factor. AfD supporters tend to distrust establishment institutions, including parliament, government, and the mainstream media. Their concerns about economic security, pensions, and social fairness are significantly greater than the social average. Increasingly, their support for the AfD reflects not an expectation that the existing system can be improved, but a search for an alternative to the current political order. Such a systemic deficit of trust will be extremely difficult for the traditional parties to repair in the short term. Fourth, a generational shift in political mobilisation has amplified political polarisation. Unlike traditional parties, which rely heavily on offline rallies and mainstream media coverage, the AfD has developed a social-media mobilisation strategy built around “raising an issue — identifying who is responsible — offering a simplified solution — building a shared identity”. It turns complex social tensions into concise political narratives, rapidly channelling public sentiment into political support. The contrast on the eve of the election was particularly telling. The establishment parties, together with trade unions and churches, organised an offline march attended by more than 10,000 people, but its reach was largely confined to those present and to traditional media coverage. The AfD held a much smaller indoor event, yet livestreaming on TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms, combined with the involvement of online influencers, gave it a reach and mobilising capacity far beyond that of the march. The contrast illustrates how the traditional parties’ methods of political mobilisation are increasingly struggling to keep pace with a political environment transformed by changes in media technology. A Microcosm of Structural Political Change in Europe The shockwaves from the Saxony-Anhalt election quickly travelled beyond the state to the federal level. Calls for political accountability followed immediately after the results were announced. The governing CDU and SPD are now under enormous pressure, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil face an unprecedented test. Political polarisation in Germany is no longer simply a regional phenomenon. The post-war model of multiparty government by establishment parties is breaking down and being reshaped. Viewed in a broader European context, the Saxony-Anhalt election is part of a continent-wide wave of party polarisation, mainstream-party decline, and rising right-wing forces. Far from an isolated phenomenon, it is a microcosm of the structural political changes unfolding across Europe. Weak economic growth, cultural tensions over immigration, and declining trust in institutions are fuelling the rise of right-wing forces in several countries, challenging the liberal internationalist order established in post-war Europe. As a core member state of the European Union, Germany’s ability to adapt its political system and the direction of its politics will have profound implications for both European integration and the evolution of the international order. Subscribe [ Pekingnology China’s Germany watchers take stock of Berlin’s uneasy turn On 7 December 2025, nearly 50 Chinese scholars and policy researchers gathered in Beijing for the 2025年德国形势年终研讨会 “2025 Year-End Seminar on the Situation in Germany… Read more 9 months ago · 31 likes · 1 comment · YIRUI LI and Yuxuan JIA ](https://www.pekingnology.com/p/chinas-germany-watchers-take-stock?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web&embedding_publication_id=1151841) [ Jiang Feng on Germany's 2025 and beyond: no easy exit ](https://www.eastisread.com/p/jiang-feng-on-germanys-2025-and-beyond) Yirui LI and Yuxuan JIA · Jan 24 The following is an op-ed by Jiang Feng, published on 29 December 2025 at Shanghai Observer 上观新闻, the digital platform of Jiefang Daily, the official newspaper of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC). [ Read full story ](https://www.eastisread.com/p/jiang-feng-on-germanys-2025-and-beyond)
Siesta Entertainment picks up sales rights to Puerto Rican preschool show
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Symphony Sleep Expands Into Anderson County
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Starz Entertainment: Price Increases, Sub Growth, And Distribution Deals
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Envy takes over German politics
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Free Lamanda Park Workshop Hands Would-Be Business Owners a 17-Item Checklist
Starting a business in Pasadena comes with a list: a name, a legal structure, insurance, financing and a city business license that has to be renewed every year. A two-hour workshop Saturday at a Pasadena branch library aims to put that list in order. SCORE Los Angeles, the nonprofit presenting the session, says attendees will leave with a 17-item checklist of steps for getting a business established. The Pasadena Public Library is sponsoring the workshop, according to SCORE. The listing says the session is meant for people thinking about starting a business and for those who have recently started one. SCORE wrote that the program “cuts through the confusion and chaos” of figuring out what it takes to start a business. According to the listing, it covers the legal requirements for a start-up business, along with other practical steps worth taking. Beyond those basics, the session covers taxes, the elements of a business plan and marketing, according to the listing. It also weighs the pros and cons of different legal structures, examines the major causes of business failure and offers ways to avoid legal problems. Attendees will hear how SCORE can help new businesses succeed. Some of the rules a new owner must follow are local. The city’s Department of Finance requires that annual license to be displayed prominently at the place of business. Businesses that sell tangible goods also need a state seller’s permit showing their Pasadena address, and any business that prepares or sells food needs approval from the Pasadena Health Department, according to the department. Even charities are covered: “Charitable non-profit businesses are required to obtain a business license,” the department’s guidance says. SCORE lists two instructors for the workshop. Dick Mader, a SCORE mentor who serves on the chapter’s board of directors, started a media distribution
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Panel debates effects increased fentanyl penalties will have on state
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Gears of War: E-Day sells 230K copies
Gears of War: E-Day has sold 230K copies since its advance-access launch on October 1 and full release on October 6. Steam accounts for 168K of those, with Xbox (console and PC) selling 62K. But there’s more to this story, as Xbox makes up the bulk of revenue. E-Day is the best-reviewed Gears game in nearly two decades (and the best one ever made, in my opinion). The Coalition has made a banger here (it’s currently in my top 10 of the year). Despite E-Day’s undeniable quality, this is a soft result. And it’s down to the business model, really. E-Day has made $37M so far, thanks to the Premium upgrade On Xbox, Game Pass is cannibalising much of the premium revenue. Our estimates show that 1.7M folks accessed E-Day via their subscription rather than a copy. But Xbox is having it both ways – or having it halfway, at least – via its Premium Edition Game Pass upgrade. Game Pass subscribers could pay $30 (or their local equivalent) for up to five days of early access starting October 1. Our estimates show that of the 1.7M who accessed E-Day through Game Pass, 722K paid for the upgrade. Between the review embargo lifting on October 1 and the full release, E-Day managed to shift another 250K early-access upgrades – no doubt helped by the campaign’s rave reviews. So despite selling far fewer copies on Steam, Xbox accounts for almost three-quarters of the revenue (roughly $26M of the $37M, versus about $11M on Steam). So “230K copies” undersells the paying audience. Including the 722K upgrades, nearly 950K people actually paid something for E-Day. The $30 upgrade is a halfstep from cannibalisation, but will Xbox go all the way? While E-Day is a sublime game, these are soft numbers for a flagship when Xbox badly needs revenue wins. E-Day sold 62K copies on Xbox against 722K Premium upgrades, so for every one copy sold on Xbox, nearly 12 Game Pass upgrades were sold. The $70 premium SKU is – functionally – dead on Xbox. Normally you can’t see what a Game Pass player would have paid, because the game’s just there in the subscription. But the $30 early-access upgrade estimate shows that 722K people demonstrated they’ll spend real money on this game. In a world without day-one Game Pass, many of these folks would have bought E-Day at $70. They paid $30 for five days early access to something they don’t own. Xbox is, in effect, charging its most valuable customers the least, based on a hangover from a tried-and-exhausted strategy from a previous administration. Those 722K willing-to-pay players generated about $21.7M via the upgrade. If three quarters of this group – mostly US and European audiences – bought E-Day outright, that’s nearly $40M. Of course, Game Pass does bring in meaningful recurring revenue, and E-Day is adding value for hundreds of thousands of subscribers. However, Game Pass is no longer growing, so Xbox is at a crossroads. Xbox is reportedly looking to do a Netflix and bolt on an ad-supported tier to pad it further. But that will just set a new floor, and leadership keeps telling us the priority now is revenue growth, which is subscriber-speak for ARPU. Xbox has already pulled Call of Duty from day-one Game Pass after day-one inclusion hammered its sales, with new CoD titles now arriving on the service around a year late. We know that some Microsoft executives believe the service devalues games outright, and rumours (which Microsoft has dismissed so far, to be fair) suggest that day-one releases could be taken off Game Pass. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe When a game this well-reviewed does this softly on its home platform, the model – not the game – gets brought into question. What else E-Day’s early adopters have played (including this month so far) Looking at E-Day‘s players on Xbox, most have played the franchise before (86% have played Gears 5, 76% Gears 4), and every game on the crossover list is either a shooter or a title from an Xbox-owned studio (though Game Pass is inflating those numbers, of course, more on that later): As for what else Xbox’s E-Day players have played this month, the top three are Fortnite (16%), Roblox (7%), and Call of Duty (6%). Another 5% played Minecraft Dungeons II, which is also on Game Pass and launched a couple of days before Gears‘ advance-access date. Many Game Pass players are happy to check out most big new additions. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Over on Steam, the top crossover games are also mostly shooters (slightly more PC-coded ones), including Space Marine 2, which was itself heavily inspired by Gears: Looking at what E-Day‘s Steam players are into this month shows who they are – as subscriptions don’t skew the data. The top three are Wardogs (13%), Deadlock (12%), and CS2 (10%), so you’ve got the restless shooter crowd checking out the new hotness. A little further down are Helldivers 2 and Space Marine 2, your co-op PVE shooter players who’ll feel right at home in Horde mode. Game Pass is skewing the playtime distribution on Xbox Looking at the playtime distribution in our platform, E-Day players on Steam are – relatively speaking – playing for longer: 54% of E-Day players on Xbox have played for five hours or less (versus 32% on Steam) 19% of Xbox players played for over 15 hours (versus 33% on Steam) 14% of Xbox players played for over 20 hours (22% on Steam) The absolute number of people playing for over 15, 20, and 50 hours is, of course, bigger on Xbox, thanks to the sheer volume of folks who came in through Game Pass (upgraders included). None of that is cause for alarm. Game Pass is the reason Xbox playtime skews lower, as when a game is free to try, people try it and bounce without putting in even an hour (17% under an hour on Xbox versus 6% on Steam). Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe The subscription brings in tourists alongside the committed, dragging down the average even when the game is excellent (but also perhaps winning over the uninitiated). It’s standard across every subscription-included title, on PS Plus too. Forza Horizon 6, for instance, had 11% of its Xbox players bounce under an hour, versus just 2% on Steam. So, Xbox’s crossroads So there we have it. Gears of War: E-Day is an incredible game whose revenues have been stifled by subscription inclusion and exclusivity. It’s the best-reviewed entry in the series in fifteen-odd years, but it still turned into one of the year’s softer flagship launches, not because players didn’t want it, but because Xbox’s own storefront gave its most willing buyers a reason not to pay. Which leaves Xbox at a crossroads. Will it keep making Gears games when the financial returns are this thin and the margins this low? And if it does, does the next one arrive off Game Pass at day one – the way CoD now does, or even on PlayStation? I think it should. Alright, back to E-Day for me! The last word Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover. [Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]
Cardinal Health Extends CVS Health Pharmaceutical Distribution Agreement Through 2032
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Fubo to Stream Minnesota Wild Games Through New Distribution Agreement with National Hockey League
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CenterPointe Hospital to host Naloxone education and distribution event
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Daniel R. Brooks Achieves Recognition for Expertise and Contributions to the Field of Biological Sciences and Academia
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BUSINESS UPDATE: All About Cannabis
SUNY Oswego’s cannabis studies prepares for growing business opportunities By Mary Beth Roach [caption id=attachment_11114 align=alignright width=383] Marthinus (Martin) Koen is associate professor of criminal justice and cannabis studies at SUNY Oswego. He and the chair of the SUNY Oswego’s Criminal Justice Department, Roger Guy, created the program.[/caption] As the cannabis industry in New York state continues to grow, so do the business opportunities. New York’s legal cannabis market is projected to hit $3 billion in annual sales this year and more than 600 licensed dispensaries are operating across the state, according to budpedia.com. It’s estimated that New York will add about 16,160 new cannabis jobs in 2026, according to the 2026 U.S. Cannabis Jobs Report. SUNY Oswego, realizing the potential, now offers two programs to acquaint both matriculated and non matriculated students with aspects of this multi-billion-dollar business. Its cannabis studies microcredential came out last year and a minor was introduced this fall. The microcredential allows traditional students to add electives to their degree. Students who are not enrolled in the college can sign up to take classes to learn more about the field, growing the crop and managing or opening a dispensary, according to Marthinus (Martin) Koen, associate professor of criminal justice and cannabis studies at SUNY Oswego. The classes are designed to give those who wish to pursue business opportunities in the field a much broader understanding of cannabis and a more overall perspective of the various aspects of running a business, such as supply chain management, customer service and best practices. “When you’re trying to market it, when you’re trying to make sales, you’re understanding will be a lot more vast and nuanced,” he said. “The last 10 years especially, the hard science on cannabis increased and we have a lot more nuanced understanding right now that hasn’t yet permeated the pop culture,” he added. Koen’s team is also hoping to develop an independent study class that will help somebody who wants to apply for a license. That the classes fill up quickly should come as no surprise. “I think there’s a lot of people who are excited about it because it’s a new industry,” he said and they see an opportunity to make some money. Matriculated students may look at it as fun to learn about and stack on top of their existing major or minor. According to the college’s website, students interested in a microcredential would take cannabis law and policy and cultivation of cannabis, along with two other electives. For the first elective they could select either the economics of cannabis or manufacturing, distribution, and logistics of cannabis; and the second elective would be either cannabis science, analysis, and well-being or cannabis and society. The idea for a microcredential in cannabis studies at SUNY Oswego began in 2023, Koen said, as SUNY statewide was advocating for these types of initiatives. Koen and the chair of the SUNY Oswego’s Criminal Justice Department, Roger Guy, began brainstorming on ideas. Catching their attention was the legalization of full recreational marijuana use in New York state in 2021 and the problem-riddled rollout of the state’s Office of Cannabis Management. Guy and Koen created a Criminal Justice Elective called CRJ 420, called cannabis and society, to see if there was any interest. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that there was interest —a lot of it. Further discussions led to the microcredential, cannabis studies, which incorporated science, business and anthropological perspectives, Koen said. They were allowed to create their own prefixes for the classes, such as CAN 310; CAN 320; and CAN 420. Yes, the 420 was intentional — it’s a slang term and symbol used to refer to cannabis consumption and counterculture — but it’s also meant to reflect that the course, being on the 400 level, is “very academically involved,” Koen explained. The term 420 was coined in 1971 by a group of California high school students as a secret code to meet at 4:20 p.m. at a campus landmark to search for an abandoned cannabis crop nearby. The phrase has evolved, to say the least. It is now associated with cannabis use worldwide. For more information, visit ww1.oswego.edu/academics/microcredentials/cannabis-studies.
Science Vs on the 49ers Substation: Anatomy of a Hatchet Job
In August, Pablo Torre Finds Out and Science Vs released an episode about my theory that electromagnetic fields from the electrical substation beside the 49ers facility may be contributing to the team’s run of soft-tissue injuries. As the originator of the theory, I was also a subject of the episode. I sat was interviewed by Wendy Zukerman and Rose Rimler of Sciene Vs. I sent them research, connected them with scientists, and spent hours digging through the City of Santa Clara’s and Silicon Valley Power’s records to help clarify critical details. Both Wendy and Rose came off as affable and professional, showing curiosity during the interviews, with Wendy going out of her way to question the “conspiracy theory” framing itself. Then they titled the episode We Solve the 49ers Viral Conspiracy Theory. I was familiar enough with their catalog that I never expected them to agree with my theory, but I did expect them to give it a fair hearing and to deliver their findings honestly. On both counts they came up short. They were not directly dishonest in anything they said, but rather in what they left out, in how what remained was cut, and in the picture painted by those two things in combination. They asked me to recorded the interview on my phone for better audio quality, and I held on to my copy for reference later. That turned out to be a fortuitous decision. Here is the raw audio of my first interview, unedited*. Only my side was recorded, so their questions aren’t on it, but you can generally infer them from the answers, and every claim I make below about what I said can be checked against my statements in this clip. (Note: Wendy had connection trouble at the beginning of the interview and was cutting in and out, which accounts for the false starts.) 0:00 -1:19:13 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Science Vs is a fun show. It is pitched at roughly a high-school understanding of science, for an audience that is skeptical, Snopes-oriented, and worried about misinformation. Take a claim circulating online, interview a supporter of the claim, interview consensus scientists, and then tell people which side of the line it lands on. I have listened to their episodes on raw milk, seed oils, 5G and other contested issues in the wellness space. I have problems with all of them, but each at least made an honest attempt to represent the actual range of scientific opinion by talking to credentialed scientists with differing perspectives. Dissenting researchers were heard from, answered, and often given a chance to respond. This episode did not do that. This article is not a relitigation of the science. I have written extensively about that already. This post is for the record. It is simply an accounting of what was wrong with their episode. Contents Is there a power plant next to the 49ers practice facility? — the clearest single example of getting something objectively wrong For the record — a high-level overview of all of the problems with their investigation Draw your own conclusions — why they had to make this episode at all What they left out about childhood leukemia — the exposure threshold, and playing games with statistics to minimize sick children What they left out about the mechanism — the body of literature they refused to cover, and evidence for the mechanism used against it The scientists Science Vs interviewed and did not air — four credential scientists who support myhe theory, recorded and cut, or not even called How they misrepresented me and my case — an answer severed from its question, and three telling edits How you would actually study the injuries — it doesn’t actually matter which team is the most injured, overall The theory: magnetic fields, oxidative stress, and collagen Since the episode never states my theory, here it is below. Those who are familiar with my work can skip this section. Electrical equipment produces magnetic fields, and those fields induce faint electrical currents in anything that passes through them, including people. My argument goes further than induced current. Mitochondria — the structures that generate a cell’s energy — run on continuous flows of electrons and protons, and those flows carry faint electromagnetic fields of their own. Maxwell’s principle of superposition shows that when two fields share the same space, they add together. An external field does not need to be strong to alter an internal field, it only needs to be present. The electron transport chain inside the mitochondria leaks a small fraction of its electrons by design, and those become reactive oxygen species — free radicals, which healthy cells use as signals. External magnetic fields cause the rate of leakage to change, increasing free radicals. When free radicals accumulate faster than the cell’s antioxidant systems can clear them, the result is oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is a recognized driver of chronic illness, including cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration, diabetes and cancer, and it is in every medical school curriculum. One of its ordinary effects in connective tissue is that it switches on matrix metalloproteinases — MMPs, the enzymes that break collagen apart — while suppressing new collagen synthesis. Tendons are made of collagen. An athlete loading his soft tissue heavily six days a week is already creating oxidative stress in the tendons, so the addition of magnetic field exposure compounds the damage and inhibits repair, making him more susceptible to injury when enormous force lands on a tendon in a fraction of a second. That is the theory. We know that EMF causes oxidative stress, and we know that oxidative stress degrades collagen. The only thing missing is a study showing that direct connection. I have never claimed certainty that the substation is contributing to the elevated injury rate. I do believe it is likely, and I believe it warrants caution, and that a revenue machine like a major NFL team can easily afford to remove the exposure out of precaution. Is there a power plant next to the 49ers practice facility? Here is the clearest single instance of the problem with this episode. It requires no knowledge of electromagnetic fields at all. This story first came to me through Jon Feliciano, a former 49er, in an interview on Willard & Dibs on 95.7 The Game. Asked about why the 49ers are always injured, he said players used to joke that it was the power plant behind the practice fields. Wendy Zukerman corrects him on air. “It’s important to say that it’s not a power plant near the 49ers site.” Torre then asks her to explain the difference between a substation and a power plant. Her answer: a power plant generates electricity and transmits it to a substation, which converts the voltage into something your house can use and sends it on to your home or your business. There are two problems with that. The first is that there is a power plant on that site. The Gianera Generating Station is a natural-gas-fired peaker plant owned by Silicon Valley Power, and it has been there since 1986. I have published aerial photographs of the location from 1987 in which the gas plant is the only thing standing, before the practice facility was even there. I even mentioned the gas plant in my first interview. (Feliciano has since gone on record about this issue, and it is clear he had the substation in mind rather than the gas plant.) The second is that her definition describes a distribution substation, and the facility beside the 49ers is not that. It is the Northern Receiving Station, which takes in bulk power from outside the city’s grid and delivers it to distribution substations. Silicon Valley Power’s own map distinguishes receiving stations from substations, and Rose Rimler even reads the label out loud in the episode when she walks through that map on air. A few minutes before the map segment, Zukerman tells Torre: “like I said, we fact check everything.” Well, maybe not everything. I made a mistake On the morning of July 6th, at 10:20, I sent Rose and Wendy two studies. During the interview I had been asked which human studies show oxidative stress from electromagnetic fields, and I had not been able to name one on the spot. Rose emailed asking for the studies, I quickly searched for a couple, and I wrote that I thought these were the most relevant from that search. Unfortunately, I was busy and did not read either one closely at first. I picked them because they were topically relevant — one on substation workers, one on power plant workers. Neither were great studies, and their problems go past the ones raised in the episode. That was careless on my part. There is context that did not make the episode, though. Before that email I had been on a Zoom call with Rose talking about EMF and oxidative stress, and I pointed her to Dr. Henry Lai at the University of Washington, who has spent years aggregating the literature on this question. His tallies show that roughly 90% of studies since the late 1990s find oxidative effects from electromagnetic field exposure — hundreds of studies, systematically counted. Rose told me she was already aware of his work. So when she asked for studies, I understood her to have the aggregate view already and that she would report anything within that context. Not reading those two carefully was still a mistake, but the larger mistake was assuming the episode would be based on a thorough review of the actual body of literature, rather than on whatever I happened to send that morning. The second email At 1:49 that same afternoon — three hours and twenty-nine minutes after the first — I sent them a second email that I had been preparing for a while. It was a structured document in six numbered sections, written in response to a request they had made two weeks earlier, laying out my entire argument with citations attached to every link in the chain. The episode aired on August 13th, five weeks later, and not a single item from the second email is in it. Here is how it opens: The full email is included at the bottom of this post in Appendix B. Nearly 1,500 words in total. It contains two named mechanisms with the physics behind them. Occupational studies in humans. The literature on oxidative stress and collagen. A section addressing the strongest counter-evidence against my own theory, which I raised myself. And a closing section stating plainly what the theory cannot yet show. My entire argument, in writing, with detailed citations for every claim, provided to them five weeks before broadcast, and none of it made it into the episode. That is the single largest omission, but it is not an isolated one. The whole episode is riddled with similar problems, and the conclusion they came to is not merely a difference of opinion about the scientific evidence. Through omission and through strategic editing, Science Vs misinformed its audience — about what the evidence shows, about what I argued, and about who they spoke to. That is a notable outcome for a show whose stated purpose is correcting misinformation. For the record I am not going to tell you that Science Vs set out to discredit me, or that they had come to their conclusion before they reported the story, or that they used misleading editing to make me look like a man retreating from his own theory. I cannot know what was in anyone’s head, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, either. What I can tell you is what is on the record. They asked me for evidence and aired the weakest thing I sent. They interviewed three scientists who supported my theory and aired none of them. They discussed childhood leukemia without ever saying the exposure level at which it appears. And they took an answer I gave weeks before Ken Karipidis, the one EMF scientist who was put on air, was interviewed, and placed it directly after his critique, where it comes off as a major concession. A friend of mine who has worked as a journalist for thirty years read that last one and called it sleazy. I agree with her. Those are just the four issues that are impossible to defend as pure editorial decision, but they are not the only issues. The most glaring issues stem from what they left out: The exposure level at which the childhood leukemia association actually appears — three to four milligauss, a number the episode never states despite it being much lower than what I measured. The mechanism itself: The episode gets as far as “oxidative stress could weaken collagen,” which leaves it sounding like speculation, rather than a known pathway. The second email, and all the studies in it. Dr. Paul Héroux at McGill, whose work my proposed mechanism rests on, whose contact details I supplied, and who was never called. Dr. Beatrice Golomb at UC San Diego, who runs a research group on oxidative stress and mitochondrial function and has specific expdertice in collagen, interviewed and not aired. Dr. David Carpenter at Albany, the most prominent academic voice on the harm from magnetic field exposure, interviewed and not aired. Dr. Joel Moskowitz at Berkeley, interviewed and not even credited. The specific, testable condition I put in writing that would make me abandon the theory. My own unprompted statement of the theory’s evidentiary gap. My caveats about my own measurements. My ranking of EMF as one factor among several rather than the only one. The new equipment installed at those facilities between 2010 and 2014, and the sharp rise in system load from 2013 onward. But that is not all. What they kept, they selectively edited to serve a narrative that was not served by the raw transcripts of the interviews. A description of thousands of commercial routers in a workplace, reduced to the Wi-Fi in your house. My own acknowledgment, multiple times, that "I'm not a scientist" clipped in an episode that spends considerable energy pointing out that I am not a scientist. And a qualification I volunteered about my own measurements, cut from my answer and delivered later by their EMF expert as a correction. Together their edit produce a portrait of a wellness guy with Wi-Fi phobia and two bad studies, backing away from his theory the moment a “real” scientist looked at it. A practice facility where nothing changed because no new substation was built. Injuries written off as random because the 49ers were not quite the single most injured team in the league over the period in question. That portrait is false even though almost no individual statement made in the episode is. Draw your own conclusions At the top of the episode, Pablo Torre says his show had been flooded with requests to investigate the substation — that it was the thing they were asked to look into over and over again. Neither show went hunting for this story. It arrived from their own audience, in volume, and it could not be waved off. A thread I posted on X reached twenty-two million people. A guy with a gaussmeter and a brand-new Substack obligated a Pultizer prize winning program to spend an hour on a question about player health, that is considered fringe enough that most media operations won’t touch it. Pablo Torre Finds Out could not ignore it. So Science Vs came in and ran a “debunking” operation instead of an investigation. Everything below is what had to be left on the cutting room floor to deliver the “debunking”. They could not ignore it. So they tried debunked it instead. The demand was strong enough to force an episode, and since the episodes release the 49ers have sustained more injuries, including season ending ones, and interest has only grown. Demand from fans and playets is strong enough to force a better investigation from someone else. An omission is not a lie until you find out what was omitted. What follows is the detailed record so you can see the full picture. Draw your own conclusions. I have drawn mine. I am going to keep publishing. A note about Pablo Torre Finds Out After the episode aired I posted publicly, calling out Pablo Torre Finds Out for concerns I had about the integrity of their investigation, and about an interview directly with Pablo Torre which had been offered but never happened. I have since spoken with a producer at PTFO. The offer had rested on a misunderstanding about where things stood between us, and it fell away as the Science Vs part of the production widened past the science. He apologized for the miscommunication and I accepted. The producer also confirmed to me that they did essentially hand off the entire investigation to Science Vs for narrative purposes — so Pablo would be genuinely curious or potentially surprised by their findings — while still taking responsibility for what went out under their name. I appreciated the candor and the accountability, and I am comfortable with where we left things. So this post is not about PTFO. My disagreement is with Science Vs. What they left out about childhood leukemia Childhood leukemia appears at three milligauss. They gave no number at all. 1. They built an EMF ruler, then discussed childhood cancer without it. The sequence on air went like this: First I measured almost 9 mG, then I measured up to 50 milligauss. Torre reacts with concern — “that sounds high.” Cut to Karipidis: the public limit is 2,000 milligauss. Torre reacts again — “What happens at 2,000?” Karipidis explains that nothing happens at 2,000, that safety factors are built in. Then: at more than 50,000 milligauss you get flickers of light in the retina, and higher still, nerve stimulation. The listener now has a ruler (their ruler) to measure these numbers with. Fifty is nothing by their ruler. Then the episode turns to childhood leukemia and states, accurately, that there is a real association — but tellingly, they never give the exposure level at which that association appears. Childhood leukemia appears at three milligauss. They conveniently left that out. The pooled analyses that produced the World Health Organization’s carcinogen classification found roughly a doubling of childhood leukemia risk above three to four milligauss. That is the number that belongs in that segment, and it is more than ten times below the reading that had just been dismissed as trivial. I gave them that number myself, on tape, in the interview. Describing my own threshold, I said my comfort level for long-term chronic exposure is three to four milligauss, but preferably one. 2. Six children in thirteen million. The episode reports that these fields might explain one to four percent of childhood leukemias, then reframes it as a German estimate of perhaps six cases among thirteen million children. Torre, to his credit, is uncomfortable. What never gets explained is why that number is small. Almost no children lives above three milligauss in Europe. Fewer than two children in a hundred, in the Italian data. So even if the risk to those children doubles, the number of additional cases across an entire country stays small — not because the hazard is small, but because hardly anyone is exposed to it. Count the whole population and the few who are exposed disappear. And the reason hardly anyone is exposed is that siting rules keep housing away from transmission lines. In Europe, at least. The Dutch government has a standing precautionary policy against building new homes in any zone where the annual average magnetic field exceeds 4 milligauss — the same number the episode never mentioned. Denmark and Norway treat 4 milligauss as the level that triggers a look at mitigation. That is five hundred times below the ICNIRP figure quoted on air. The United States has no federal equivalent. That is evidence of infrastructure siting policy working. It is not evidence that there is no hazard. It is evidence that we already act as though there is one. If you listen to the raw audio you will hear that my proposed solution is EMF exposure is to build better infrastructure. What they left out about the mechanism 3. They accused me of cherry-picking, and then cherry-picked themselves. On air, Zukerman tells Torre that people who worry about electromagnetic fields dismiss the studies showing null results and collect the ones showing harm, and that this is why you have to be careful not to cherry-pick. They had two papers I had rattled off in a hurry, and a second email containing a carefully chosen set. They ran the two weakest, graded them on air, and presented the result as the state of the evidence for not only my theory, but the whole question of oxidative stress from magnetic fields. That is cherry-picking from my emails. The bigger picture is what they did with the literature as a whole. Zukerman acknowledges it exists, dismisses it, and disposes of it in a single stroke. You can go online right now, she tells Torre, and find scores of studies showing these fields increase oxidative stress. The issue, she says, is that they are not studies in people. Many of them are in people. The occupational studies in my second email are in people. That email had been in her inbox for five weeks. She waved off the literature on a factual claim that the documents in her possession contradict. (I have written separately about the evidentiary standard at work here). The effect was that they essentially baited me: ask the subject to supply the evidence, take the weakest thing he sends, and let that stand as a proxy for the whole argument. Wendy has been doing this show for ten years and clearly knows how to extract what she needs for her desired narrative. 4. They presented the collagen-improvement research as a gotcha, but I had already addressed it. The episode treats the existence of studies showing that EMF can improve collagen as a surprise that undercuts me, but I had pre-emptively addressed that five weeks earlier in the email they ignored. Those studies use measured, high-intensity pulsed dosing. The mechanism by which they work is oxidative signalling. The cell reads a controlled rise in reactive oxygen species as a warning, upregulates its antioxidant defenses, mounts a repair response, and the therapy stops before the system is overwhelmed. The key point is that it induces an oxidative response, which means those studies are actually evidence for my proposed mechanism, not against it. A field that produces a therapeutic effect cannot be biologically inert (which is the implication when they say “Nothing happens at 2,000 milligauss). Chronic ambient exposure is the same pathway with no off switch, and it is most consequential during the evening and while sleeping, when the body is in repair mode and the exposure does not stop. Section 5 of my email is titled What about the study showing improved collagen synthesis. I raised the counter-evidence myself, explained why I did not think it refuted the theory, and wrote that I was disappointed the question had not come up in the interview. That is worth holding against the cherry-picking charge in the item above: the studies they presented as inconvenient for me were studies I had gone out of my way to put in front of them. 5. Section 1 of my email stated a critical argument that was never put to the expert directly responsible for it. My email says the exposure limits exist to prevent acute effects and do not address chronic exposure at all, and that my dispute is with the entire framework. Zukerman gestures at this once. After Karipidis gives the 2,000 milligauss figure, she tells Torre that I would object because those levels do not capture “more subtle effects.” That is not my argument, and “subtle” is doing a lot of work here. My argument is that the limits are built to prevent acute effects — nerves firing, muscles twitching, etc — and were not designed to address chronic exposure at all. In fact, ICNIRP’s own documents state as much themselves. Mine is a structural objection to what the standard measures, reduced as a concern about subtlety, it becomes a matter of degree, rather than a categorical difference. They interviewed Ken Karipidis, vice chair of ICNIRP — the body that writes those limits. He was asked what the limit is, but he was never asked how it applies to chronic exposure. The scientists Science Vs interviewed and did not air 6. They interviewed four officials of the standards body. The episode credits roughly a dozen researchers. Four of them are associated with ICNIRP. Ken Karipidis is the vice chair. Rodney Croft chaired ICNIRP from 2020 to 2024 and led the development of its current guidelines. Dan Baaken is ICNIRP’s scientific secretary. Frank de Vocht sits on the Main Commission. One of them speaks in the episode. Their institution’s position is more than adequately represented — the 2,000 milligauss figure, the safety factors, the assurance that nothing happens below the line. 7. The four who were left out. Dr. Beatrice Golomb is Professor of Medicine at UC San Diego — a physics undergraduate degree, a PhD in biology, an MD. She directs a research group whose stated focus is the relationship between oxidative stress, mitochondrial function and health. That is the mechanism the episode spent its first half dismissing. Her published work includes the fluoroquinolone case series behind the FDA’s black box warning on an antibiotic class that ruptures tendons, where the accepted mechanism is oxidative stress and mitochondrial toxicity — the back half of my chain, already on a drug label. She is in the credits. She is not in the episode. She has told me she finds my theory biologically plausible, and that she has a recording of her interview. Dr. David Carpenter directed the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany for decades and is the most prominent academic voice arguing these fields cause harm. Childhood leukemia is the reason these fields carry a WHO classification at all, and Carpenter is the person you call if you want that case made by someone who has spent a career on it. He is in the credits. He is not in the episode. He has told me that when he was interviewed they could not have been less interested in what he had to say. Dr. Joel Moskowitz directs the Center for Family and Community Health at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. He told me directly that they interviewed him and that he thought it went well. He does not appear in the episode, and unlike Golomb and Carpenter, he does not even appear in the credits. Dr. Paul Héroux at McGill is the researcher whose work provides the foundation for the oxidative stress mechanism my theory rests on. I gave Rose his email address and phone number. He was never interviewed. They never even called him. 8. “He’s not a scientist.” The episode leans hard on the fact that I am not a credentialed scientist. Zukerman says it. Torre repeats it. “At all.” Having built a segment on that, they then left out the physicist-biologist-physician, the professor of public health, the director of a university environmental health institute, and the McGill researcher whose work the primary mechanism comes from. They spent the episode telling their audience I am not a scientist, and then kept four actual scientists who support the theory off because their argument does not survive otherwise. How they misrepresented me and my case 9. They played my words as a response to an interview I had never heard. Near the end of the hour, Zukerman says she went to me and told me the evidence was lacking. Then she plays me saying I am not wedded to it being an EMF, that I have staked my reputation on it needing more study, and that I am not certain of anything. That segment was placed immediately after Karipidis had finished taking the cherry-picked papers apart. It plays as a man folding under expert scrutiny. Commenters have used it against me since, but it is incorrect. Here is the sequence as it happened. I was interviewed. Karipidis was interviewed weeks later. I was never told what he said, or even who he was. I was never asked to respond to it. I did not know his name until the episode aired. That is not a simple editing decision. That is a quote from one interview, moved to follow a critique from a different interview it was not a response to, so that it would land as a concession. A friend of mine who has spent thirty years as a journalist read that sequence and called it sleazy. She is right. The full passage is reproduced in Appendix A, and it is worth reading. What airs is the preamble. Four paragraphs later I say “to directly answer your question” — and that answer, about what would change my mind if the team relocated, is not in the episode. Neither is the sentence two paragraphs on, where I say the EMF might turn out to be ten percent of the problem. I will say the underlying point again, though, because I meant it and I still do. I am not wedded to my theory that magnetic fields from the substation are contributing to the 49ers injuries. I could be wrong. What I am wedded to is the process of scientific inquiry, and the fact that we should be cautious around these exposures and we need more independently funded studies. 10. Three telling edits. They cut “I’m not a scientist” mid-sentence. What I said: “...and I am not certain of anything. I’m not a scientist. To me, I find the mechanisms compelling. I will go back to the fact that I got into this not because of the 49ers, but because of clients I was working with who suffer from EDS...” What aired: “...and that I am not certain of anything. I’m not.” The clip ends on the first two words of the sentence in which I say I am not a scientist, in an episode that spends considerable energy establishing that I am not a scientist. The full sequence is in Appendix A. They cut my own description of my work. Asked what I do, I said I run a wellness business, that I am focused on writing software to help people navigate environmental stressors, that environmental health is my focus, and that I also do independent journalism and research. What aired is the wellness business and the environmental health, with the software and the journalism removed from my own answer. The software engineering does come up later — narrated by them, as a hacker who grew up to write firmware — but my current work, in my own words, arrives as “wellness guy.” Thousands of commercial routers became home Wi-Fi. What I described: working at a wireless networking company surrounded by thousands of Wi-Fi routers, and a stress-induced health collapse afterward that working in that environment contributed to. What aired: Wi-Fi, the kind you have at home — reinforced by a clip of Christian McCaffrey talking about turning his router off at night. Three cuts, and every one of them makes me seem less credible. That is not a coincidence. 11. I gave them my own caveats and the test that would disprove me. In the first email I wrote that a well-designed chronic, ambient-level exposure study in tendon showing no collagen degradation, run over many months, would undercut my confidence in the theory. That is a specific, testable condition, stated in advance and in writing. There was a second interview, weeks later, which was not used in the episode, but in that I asked again for the falsification criterion to be included. What the episode presents instead is a man saying “we need more study,” which reads as a hedge, an open-ended request for the benefit of the doubt. It is the opposite of a hedge. Section 6 of my second email says, unprompted, that as far as I am aware there is not a single study showing EMF-driven oxidative stress degrading collagen in a human in vivo or in human tendon in a lab. I wrote that because it is true and because it is the first thing anyone should check. Under their standard it becomes the hinge of the entire first half, framed as something they had to surface without my cooperation. I had handed it to them five weeks earlier. And in the interview I said that my 25 to 50 milligauss readings were taken at knee level, and that these fields attenuate quickly, so by the time it reaches your head it is not that high anymore. That did not air either. The qualification arrives later, from Karipidis, as a correction. How you would actually study the injuries 12. They measured the wrong thing. The episode spends its final act on whether the 49ers are the most injured team in the NFL, finds no clean ranking, and lands on “injuries are random”. That is the wrong test. You would define the exposure — measured field levels at the facility — and the outcome narrowly: soft-tissue injuries, not a single MSK injury count that a broken finger and a ruptured Achilles both land in. Then you would compare the 49ers to themselves before and after the exposure changed, and compare that change against every other team over the same window. That controls for league-wide shifts in rules, turf and training load. It is a difference-in-differences design, and it is standard. I sent them that argument on July 28th, in writing, along with the fact that in eleven of the past twelve seasons the 49ers had finished top ten in Adjusted Games Lost. And by the episode’s own reporting, the 49ers are second in games lost to injury over the past decade, with FTN’s Aaron Schatz confirming that once you adjust for starters they come out second worst in the league — after having been one of the healthiest teams for years before that. A finding like that is where an investigation starts, not where it stops. 13. I did a lot of substation research for the episode that was never aired. I had reported that the substation next to the facility was expanded in 2014. That was wrong, and Rose Rimler and I sorted it out together. They gave me credit on air, which I appreciated, but framed it as a concession on my part to something they had found. In fact I had been investigating it myself, was uncertain before they asked, but was waiting for clarification from Silicon Valley Power. The uncertainty centered around a substation named “Esparanca” that was proposed right behind the facilities as part of the stadium construction, but now appears to never have been built. I spent days in Silicon Valley Power’s records, and did eventually reach Silicon Valley Power for confirmation and indentified the mistake myself. I also gave them highly detailed documents on what we do know about those facilities: new equipment installed between 2010 and 2014, and load growth across the system with an inflection around 2013–2014, with the Northern Receiving Station carrying the highest capacity in the system and sitting closest to the data center corridor. None of that is in the episode. I have a separate piece about it coming out soon. *I cut 2 seconds from the raw audio to remove personal information that had no connection to anything in the episode. Appendix A: the passage the clip was taken from This is the sequence from my first interview, in full. The episode uses one fragment of it. It’s tricky because my understanding is that there’s something like a 15-year half-life on collagen remodeling issues. They’re going to get a new crop of players. What I really need, though, is for the injuries to be broken down so we can see the soft tissue injuries. Right now, they’re categorized as MSK injuries, but let’s say we can actually identify them more specifically. Is that right? He was able to do that? Oh, cool. I wasn’t able to find that information. Interesting — I didn’t know that data existed. I tried so hard to get it, and I didn’t know it was available. Maybe you could connect me with that person. That would be amazing. I’m not wedded to it being an EMF, honestly. I’m not. I would say that, to a certain extent, I’ve staked my reputation on the fact that it needs more study. It’s important to look into it, and I am not certain of anything. I’m not a scientist. To me, I find the mechanisms compelling. I will go back to the fact that I got into this not because of the 49ers, but because of clients I was working with who suffer from EDS, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a tendon hypermobility issue. This condition is documented to be partially caused by oxidative stress. I’ve worked with them to mitigate their EMF exposure and have seen people improve. I think it’s a bigger story. In a way, the 49ers represent an occupational cluster with specific exposure risks. If someone would conduct a study on this, I believe we could learn a lot. Perhaps we would discover that it’s like, okay, maybe it’s 10% of the problem. I don’t know the exact number, but I think either way, conducting the study would provide valuable insights. To directly answer your question, it’s challenging for me because it’s part of a bigger story. If the 49ers move and stop having injuries, I might conclude that it was related to the substation. However, if they move and still experience injuries, I would want to analyze the nature of those injuries. Are they primarily soft tissue injuries? I don’t think it’s necessarily a case closed, but the story might lose traction at that point regardless. Three things are worth noting. The aired fragment stops immediately before the sentence in which I say I am not a scientist — the cut described in item 10. It also stops four paragraphs before the words “to directly answer your question.” What the episode plays is the throat-clearing. The actual answer, about what would change my mind, never airs. And two paragraphs in, I say the EMF might turn out to be ten percent of the problem. That is the ranking the episode says I never gave. Appendix B: the full email, July 6th, 1:39 PM Hi Rose, You asked me to send you some studies a couple of weeks ago. I apologize for the delay. I have been incredibly busy. I also wanted to give you a chance to dig in yourself, and get your own perspective before I influenced you too much with mine. That said, I do want to make sure that the actual argument is abundantly clear, so here it is! One note before I begin, there are really two separate questions here: Does the substation cause the soft-tissue injuries? That was my specific claim, and what the podcast is about. Is the theory biologically sound? Can 50/60 Hz fields at these levels do anything biological below the safety limits? Question two is why people have been calling me a conspiracy theorist. The regulatory and advisory bodies (ICNIRP, etc) maintain that anything below their exposure limits is biologically inert, and that position is broadly accepted within the mainstream, but the actual science paints a different picture. To defend my theory I’ve had to defend a much larger claim: that the advisory bodies have the biology wrong. I can’t honestly answer question 1 without first addressing that. Here’s is a simplified outline of my theory, with links to studies: 1. Advisory body thresholds for biological effects The ELF magnetic-field limits (ICNIRP’s ~2,000 mG public / 10,000 mG occupational) exist to prevent acute effects from exposure. If a magnetic field is strong enough, it makes nerves fire and muscles contract. Muscles twitch. You can see faint flashes of light in your vision. People can even feel tingling or even a shock. That happens due to Faraday’s law, which states that a time-varying magnetic field induces an electric field inside the body via the creation of Eddy currents.The standards assume that those currents do nothing below the twitch threshold. They do not consider chronic effects at all. My argument is that they are biologically active and do have chronic effects. 2. There are multipe ELF-EMF mechanisms for inducing oxidative stress. This is basic biophysics. Below are the two primary mechanisms. Simplest first. Dr. Paul Héroux of McGill has the most intuitive explanation, which rests on Maxwell’s principle of superposition: because Maxwell’s equations are linear, two sets of electromagnetic waves sharing the same space simply add together. In the interview I pictured a pebble dropped into a pond, sending out clean ripples. Then a boat motors past at distance, sending larger waves, and where they meet the ripples, the two add together and the original pattern gets distorted. In our cells, the mitochondria run on continuous currents of electrons and protons that carry their own faint electromagnetic fields. An external field from a substation, by the principle of superposition, adds to those internal currents and shifts the pattern. The electron transport chain in the mitochondria leaks a fraction of its electrons by design as reactive oxygen species (ROS), which act as signalling molecules in a healthy cell. Distorting that field increases that electron leakage, creating oxidative stress. A tiny electromagnetic interference results in a large downstream effect. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844025006474 The more complex pathway is Dimitris Panagopoulos’s Ion Forced-Oscillation / Voltage-Gated Ion Channel (IFO-VGIC) mechanism. Weak, polarized, low-frequency fields force the ions (calcium, potassium, sodium) next to an ion channel’s voltage sensor to oscillate; because that force scales with the inverse cube of the distance involved, fields far below the stimulation threshold can still force the channel open, disrupting the cell’s ion balance and driving ROS overproduction (Nitric oxide and superoxide interact and produce peroxynitrite, a highly unstable cytotoxin that breaks down into free radicals). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366088934 https://www.spandidos-publications.com/ijo/59/5/92 https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/18/10041 https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2025.1585441/full https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3772193/ 3. Evidence of oxidative stress, in vivo, in humans from ELF-EMF There are many studies, and the strongest are occupational, which applies to the 49ers situation. 115 power-plant workers vs. 145 office controls. Serum malondialdehyde (MDA, the standard lipid-peroxidation marker), superoxide dismutase, and catalase were all significantly higher in the exposed group, and the markers rose with increasing field exposure. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3233/WOR-203244 A follow-up where they reversed the oxidative stress in power plant workers. A double-blind randomized controlled trial: 91 power-plant workers given vitamin E, vitamin C, both, or placebo for 90 days. The antioxidant groups showed reduced lipid peroxidation and raised antioxidant capacity versus controls. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32191586/ A spot-welder study: 46 welders occupationally exposed at 50 Hz, showed significantly altered red-blood-cell antioxidant enzyme activity and concluded ELF-MF “might act as an oxidative stressor… even at the recommended levels of exposure.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18504600/ A substation-specific study found oxidative stress and DNA damage https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24460415/ 4. Oxidative stress degrades collagen This half isn’t controversial at all. Oxidative stress activates the matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) that break collagen down and suppresses its synthesis. Here are three example studies: Siwik et al. 2001: Oxidative stress raises MMPs and lowers collagen synthesis in cardiac fibroblasts. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11121376/ Fisher et al. 2009: Collagen fragmentation drives oxidative stress and elevates MMP-1 in aged human skin. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2631323/ Varani et al. 2006: Decreased collagen production in oxidatively aged skin. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16723701/ 5. What about the study showing improved collagen synthesis I’m glad you asked this question, and I’m bummed we didn’t get to it in the interview because it is a great question, and very important to understand. Superficially it may appear to be a refutation of my theory, but I would argue that it actually supports the underlying argument. That study used a short, high-intensity pulsed dose: therapeutic-PEMF, the same type of field used clinically to stimulate bone and tissue healing. The reason this works is because it triggers the very same biological pathways that can lead to oxidative stress. The exposure still stimulates ROS production, but done at a controlled dosage, for a limited duration it has a different effect. The cell reads the ROS as a warning signal and it upregulates its antioxidant defenses, and mounts a repair/proliferation response. The therapy is then stopped before the cell gets overwhelmed. That is essentially a hormetic response: a small dose of a stressor producing a beneficial adaptation. Two things follow: At the very least, this means the field is biologically active, which by itself undercuts the regulatory claim that these fields are inert below their thresholds. There is a wealth of literature on PEMF (pulsed EMF) bone regeneration and calcium channel signalling (which is the second mechanims in section one). Here is one. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep13856 At best, it leads us straight to my actual concern, which is that under chronic, chaotic and unregulated exposure, the cell’s antioxidant capacity gets overwhelmed, resulting in oxidative stress. There are plentiful examples of things that are beneficial at controlled doses, but harmful at uncontrolled doses. Excecise is one obvious, uncontroversial example. Botox is perhaps a more interesting example. 6. What about a study that shows EMF causing collagen degradation in humans? As far as I am aware there is not a single study showing EMF-driven oxidative stress degrading collagen in a human, in vivo, or in human tendon in a lab. There are studies involving isolated fibroblasts though, which secrete collagen. The most relevant one showed that human fetal scleral fibroblasts exposed to 50 Hz ELF-EMF showed a significant decrease in collagen synthesis and that MMP-2 expression was upregulated, which is the exact mechanism I described in section 2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3626379/ That’s it! Thanks again for the interview. Best, Peter Anthony Cowan Environmental Health · Wellness Tech · Researcher & Journalist Publisher & Editor, Living Energy Bio: petercowan.comSocial: X · Instagram · TikTokApp: sunlightis.lifePhone: [redacted]
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The Fierce Battle For Kids’ Eyeballs...Plus Two “Devils” Face Off
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.) During the week of this report, Spider-Man: Brand New Day hit theaters and went on to become one of the biggest films of all time. So, you know what that means! It’s time for a poll! Recently, Project Hail Mary came to Prime Video and became a top five film for them, but didn’t smash streaming records, a feat I cautiously thought it could accomplish. Can Spider-Man 4 do better? To set the stakes, some of the biggest films of all time do just okay on streaming. Wicked, Top Gun: Maverick, and Barbie come to mind... But unlike those films, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a Sony film which means it’s headed to Netflix, the world’s largest streamer. Now, per friend of the newsletter and my go-to Netflix expert, Kasey Moore of What’s on Netflix, Sony films usually appear on Netflix 120 days after they premiere, which means Spidey 4 would land on Netflix on, checks notes, 28-November, one of the two biggest streaming weekends of the year! But Sony occasionally delays its biggest hits for a bit longer, to give them more time to make money on PVOD, so Spider-Man: Brand New Day might not swing onto Netflix until late December or even February 2027. Loading... Okay, on to this week’s issue. Since The Super Mario Galaxy Movie made its way to Peacock, I’m looking at the true workhorse of streaming viewership: kids films. And the surprising film that bested most Netflix animated movies. All that, plus Hulu has a new show that might be a hit (for them…?), two “Devils” square off on streaming, Zendaya tries to find some streaming magic, Netflix’s I Will Find You continues to do well, House of the Dragon tries to break into the season three top ten, some big NBC sports and summer programs, what friendly neighborhood Spider-Man character actually generates the most viewership on streaming, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more. Let’s dive right in! (Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, JustWatch and Reelgood interest data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of July 27th to August 2nd, 2026. You can find a link to my terminology here.) Subscribe Film - As The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Hits Peacock, How Have Kids Films Fared in 2026? Like Mario hopping on a Koopa, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie landed on Peacock on 30-July. (Yeah, I kinda forced that Mario reference.) How did it do? Great, just like the first film. It got 13.0 million hours on its opening, and that’s good enough to take second place among Peacock films on the Nielsen charts all time: As I mention all the time, Peacock just isn’t the world’s biggest streamer—in fact, nowhere close—so its films struggle to put up numbers like Netflix (or even Prime Video and Disney+). So this is a solid debut for that streamer. And as we saw last time, The Super Mario Bros. Movie had a HUGE second life on Netflix when it moved streamers. This chart doesn’t even show how long the first Mario lasted on Netflix: a whopping, KPop-esque 31 weeks. For NBCUniversal, though, the big win was the second Mario movie grossing $429 million in America and over $1 billion globally. But yeah, to add a very strong streaming performance only makes its success even greater. Illumination pretty clearly has another hit franchise on their hands. This is a good time, though, to check in on kids films so far in 2026. We’ve had a few big, big titles, a rare Netflix success, and some disappointments. Let’s start with the top animated films since November of 2025, over their first four weeks on the charts, along with a few of the “best all time” animated films: (As a reminder, if a film doesn’t make the Nielsen top ten lists, I don’t have data for it, so it gets a “zero” in terms of viewership. Now, it had some viewership, but I don’t know what it is, so it gets a zero.) I added a few titles to get an idea of what the best of the best looks like in terms of animation. And you can see, through four weeks, Zootopia 2 can now claim “one of the biggest streaming films of all time” titles. GOAT too did surprisingly well, besting Netflix’s biggest films (Swapped and In Your Dreams) through four weeks. When I’ve talked about how films can have varying performances on streaming compared to their box office, this is what I mean. Goat just managed to gross even $103 million at the box office—so it’s popular, but just barely—but did very well on streaming. Of course, what set Encanto and KPop Demon Hunters apart from the rest was their absolutely insane longevity. Here are the kids film charts through eight weeks to show that: And really KPop Demon Hunters just kept going, and no 2025 or 2026 kids films have had that sort of longevity. I can’t wait to see the sequel in theaters. Film - Two Devils and a Drama As I wrote last week, in the past, theatrical-first film flops weren’t eligible for “Miss of the Week” or “Miss of the Year” honors/dishonors, but since so many more films go to theaters first these days, I’ve made them eligible now! But it’s complicated. You see, this is a Streaming Ratings Report, emphasis on streaming, which makes analyzing this week’s two biggest streaming misses—The Drama on HBO Max (A24’s dramedy starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson) and Prime Video’s The Devil Mouth (a killer shark movie starring young attractive people)—somewhat tricky. The Drama isn’t eligible for Luminate, but The Devil’s Mouth only had 1.5 million hours in its first week: The Devil’s Mouth notched 5.2 million hours according to Nielsen. Meanwhile, The Drama missed the charts entirely. Not great! But Prime Video is a much bigger streamer than HBO Max. That said, HBO Max titles are on Prime Video, but I think Prime Video prioritizes their original/exclusive titles, which helps boost their viewership. Complicating this further, The Drama made $48 million in the US—while A24 sells foreign distribution; the $57 million of overseas grosses helps A24 sell overseas rights for money in the future—off of a $28 million budget (which seems low for Zendaya and Pattinson, so they might have backend). The Devil’s Mouth, though, had zero dollars at the box office. The other stats for The Devil’s Mouth are bleak, and by “bleak”, I mean horrendous: a 4.7 on 15K reviews on IMDb (yikes) and a 46 on Metacritic (double yikes). The Drama, though buzzy online, only has a solid (but far from elite) 7.1 IMDb score on 121K reviews and a 59 on Metacritic (which is far, far lower than I’d have guessed). So which film is the “Miss of the Week”? I’m giving it to The Devil’s Mouth for one simple reason: it’s a horror film. And almost all horror films, even poorly reviewed horror films, should get a shot in theaters to at least try to recoup some of their budgets. The Drama made money at the box office and The Devil’s Mouth didn’t. It’s just like the situation last issue with Obsession and Masters of the Universe. Sure, Obsession didn’t pop on the streaming charts, but at least it already made it money at the box office. And as we’ve been seeing for years now and we’ll see all fall, theatrical films just do better on streaming. After all, the big “devil” winner this week was actually The Devil Wears Prada 2 with 14.8 million hours according to Nielsen. That’s right, The Devil Wears Prada 2—one of the box office success stories of May—came to streaming and parlayed its $220 million box office into 14.8 million Nielsen hours. Disney also put out a datecdote that it had 15.2 million “views” globally in five days, but again we don’t have a lot of great context for what that means. Here’s how it stacks up to other Hulu films, since I’m categorizing this mainly as a Hulu title (though it was also on Disney+): Share Quick Notes on Film We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… Whether Hulu has a new hit show on its hands... The top first and third seasons of all time and which shows are climbing those charts… What version of Spidey is the most popular... What sport and TV show are performing better on NBC than the NBA... All the flops, bombs and misses... ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support. Coming Soon! Next week, wow, things stay so busy. One of streaming’s biggest shows of all time, Ted Lasso, returns along with new YA-ish shows from Hulu (The Shards, from Ryan Murphy) and Prime Video (Sterling Point). The Challenge moves to Paramount+, plus My Life with the Walter Boys returns to Netflix and Futurama returns to Hulu. And Netflix has a new horror film, The Last House. Lots to talk about! All month, things stay busy. We’re talking Reacher on Prime Video! Outer Banks and Tires on Netflix! Lanterns on HBO Max! UFC 330 on Paramount+ and the MLB Field of Dreams game on Netflix. And a ton of smaller films come to streaming. Long term, the VMAs are back on 27-Sep! I feel like I haven’t heard much about this show in past years, but I’m seeing more news coverage and buzz for this show than in past years. I’m curious to see how it does.
The Not-So-Secret Winner in Netflix and YouTube’s Streaming Wars Battle
(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.) Here’s a good piece of advice: when someone tells you a company has “won” the streaming wars, just assume they haven’t. Remember the narratives about the streaming media over the last few years: 2024 - Netflix has won the streaming wars! 2025 - YouTube has won the streaming wars! Yet…in 2026, I’d categorize it as… 2026 - Netflix and YouTube are battling for talent! Netflix and YouTube are aggressively fighting for top creators, marking a fierce new battle in the streaming wars. For two companies that “won”, that certainly doesn’t seem like winning behavior. If you win, you don’t have to fight for talent, because talent has to come to you. This is a good reminder that, if the streaming wars are a war—and I think they are—we should know what type of war they are. So it’s worth revisiting one of my big theories of the streaming wars, that the war these battles most represent is… The Thirty Years’ War1 I prefer this war to other, simpler wars, because, while it featured two “sides”—based on religion—and the current war has two main sides—tech versus entertainment—it also featured a lot of smaller players battling it out, sometimes switching sides. And that’s still the case for entertainment and media, despite the above headlines. I’d recommend this truism: if someone has to tell you they won the streaming wars, they probably haven’t. To wit, if someone told you they were fighting in the Thirty Years’ War—and no, they didn’t call it that at the time—and in year five, they told you they won, well, obviously they had 25 more years to go. That’s a lot of preamble to say, the story of the week is the latest battles between YouTube and Netflix. Their battle for talent says a lot about how hard this war will be to win. All that, plus The Curse of the Mogul in action, Netflix providing more (theatrical) data, whether Apple TV is in trouble, AMC getting in on distribution, and a whole lot more. Subscribe Today’s article is sponsored by… Substack is hosting a live Emmys watch party, starting at 5PM on the East Coast (2PM on the West Coast) on Monday, 14-Sep. Check it out! Tune In Most Important Story of the Week - Who’s the Big Winner in the Netflix vs YouTube Showdown? Netflix spent a lot in 2025, and then even more in 2026 adding a host of “creators”—both podcasters and YouTube stars—to their TV lineup. Frankly, for years, I’ve thought that more major studios/streamers/channels should look to YouTube as the launching pad for future stars and IP. Either by poaching proven talent—albeit at good prices—or by treating YouTube as an arena for your “A&R” reps to scout new talent and emerging voices. Netflix started executing the former strategy—which I thought was smart—while Focus Features did the latter with Obsession. So what changed? YouTube finally responded! Yikes. That’s a strong response, and stronger than I’d argue most narratives about YouTube suggest. People often describe YouTube as a self-reinforcing flywheel of success. Get on YouTube or perish. So why did YouTube have to respond? Because other folks poaching their top talent could really damage their business, implying their flywheel is a pinch more rickety than most analysis suggests. Clearly, creators can envision a life off YouTube and potentially a much more lucrative one. The Curse of the Media Mogul is Playing Out In Real Time We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… Who is the big winner in the Netflix versus YouTube battle… The biggest question about YouTube… Plus why YouTube’s saber rattling should worry talent… Why I’m skeptical that a U.S. federal tax credit for film will happen… What key change could pull Apple from the streaming business. AMC getting in on distribution… Some great reads on the Warner Bros.-Paramount merger... And a whole lot more... ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support.
Intel Panther Lake Teardown, 18A, BSPD, GAAFET, SemiAnalysis STEEL
Panther Lake debuts the first commercial implementation of backside power delivery (BSPDN), introduces Intel’s first iteration of gate-all-around (GAA) transistors, and showcases their advanced packaging capabilities with its Foveros-S assembly. With Panther Lake, Intel’s manufacturing arc has shifted from nebulous roadmaps to shipped silicon, a significant milestone on their long road back to competitive semiconductor manufacturing. To evaluate the extent of Intel’s comeback, we tore down Panther Lake. The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WE’RE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. Our teardown traces 18A from its four-sheet RibbonFETs (Intel’s marketing name for GAAFETs) and gate stacks through contacts, frontside and backside wiring, and the bonded carrier. We explain how these material and integration choices improve gate control and reduce resistance, while adding capacitance, thermal resistance, and process complexity. Our measurements put Panther Lake’s 18A compute logic and TSMC N3E GPU logic at similar logic density. However, 18A does not lead TSMC N3P, N2 or Samsung SF2 in peak density. Panther Lake’s CPU cores are incremental updates, and the high-end GPU still uses TSMC N3E. Panther Lake assembles one compute tile, one GPU tile, and one I/O tile atop a passive base tile using Intel’s Foveros-S advanced packaging. Both compute tile variants use Intel 18A. The Xe3 GPU options are a 4-core GT1 tile on Intel 3 and a larger 12-core GT2 tile on TSMC N3E. Both I/O tile variants use TSMC N6. [1], [2] Our analysis centers on the PTL-U compute tile, both the 4-core and 12-core GPU tiles, as well as the 12-lane I/O tile. In conventional chips, power and signal are routed through the same frontside metal stack towards the device frontend. Power rails consume scarce routing resources near the transistors, while tall via stacks carry VDD and VSS from the coarse upper wires to local rails. Backside power delivery (BSPD) moves the main power network behind the transistor layer, to the backside, separating it from frontside signal routing. We covered BSPD and its impacts in 2024. [3], [4], [5] Intel’s BSPD implementation, branded as “PowerVia”, routes power through dedicated backside metals to nano-TSVs, which connect those rails to local source/drain (S/D) contacts. Implementing that separation requires Intel to build the interconnect stacks from both sides of the wafer. The frontside comprises the M0-M14 signal stack, while the backside comprises the BM0-BM5 power stack. M0 and BM0 are closest to the transistors. The nano-TSVs connect the two sides, but Intel patterns and etches each via from the front after forming the contacts. A narrow via runs from the side of the contact deep into the silicon substrate. Intel then completes the frontside signal metal stack, bonds the wafer to a carrier, flips it and removes the original substrate until the buried via tips are exposed. The backside metal stack is then deposited directly on the revealed vias. The nano-TSV and backside-via profiles taper in opposite directions because Intel forms them from opposite sides of the wafer. The transistor structures form the FEOL. Local contacts and nano-TSVs connect them to the wiring. M0 begins the frontside interconnect stack. The silicon carrier remains attached above the frontside interconnects. It supports the device wafer during substrate removal and backside processing and remains part of the finished chip’s thermal path. PowerVia removes the main power distribution from the congested frontside metals, routing supply through shorter and wider backside wires. Its lateral landing still occupies area in the standard cell, so it recovers less cell area than a direct backside contact. [3] Nano-TSVs beside the logic devices carry VDD or VSS from the backside power network, while signal connections continue upward through the frontside metals. Backside Interconnects Samsung SF2 data is included for comparison to Panther Lake’s within this article. SF2 is the incumbent GAA foundry node but lacks BSPD, serving as a useful reference to evaluate 18A. A full teardown of Samsung’s S26 products, processed on SF2, will be shared soon.Nanosheet-cut EDS comparison. The PowerVia supply path runs from the backside Cu rails through Mo-lined W nano-TSVs to the local transistor contacts. In this cross section, the tapered connection spans roughly 150 nm from the contact level to BM0. The Ta liner confines Cu and promotes adhesion to the surrounding stack; the AlOₓ etch stop controls the next dielectric etch above the rail. Dielectric beneath the ribbons electrically separates the devices from the backside wiring and removes the conducting silicon body below the channel. [6] AlOₓ serves as an etchstop (ES), enabling endpointing and protecting the underlying layers. Low-volatility aluminum fluoride reaction products resist the fluorinated plasma, allowing a thin AlOₓ film to protect the metal while the surrounding low-k dielectric is removed. [6], [7]. While the BM0 and layers above the M1 lines show double AlOx layers, Our SMIC N+3 teardown showed single AlOₓ layers. SMIC uses a simpler local AlOₓ substack, while the remaining cap and etch sequence provide the required landing protection. So why double layers? The closely spaced AlOₓ doublets provide two protected endpoints in the etch sequence. Intel documents an AlOₓ/SiN/AlOₓ stack that explains the benefit. The main dielectric plasma etch stops on the first AlOₓ film; a selective wet clear opens that film; a second plasma etch removes the intermediate SiN and stops on the second AlOₓ film. The final wet clear exposes the metal landing surface. SiN is the intermediate dielectric in Intel’s published example. [8] The second stop protects the metal through a cap breakthrough. Wide openings can etch faster than narrow ones, and etch depth varies across the wafer. Metal under an early-clearing opening would otherwise be exposed while other openings still need more etching. Staged protection widens the process window and reduces metal erosion, corrosion and void formation. [8] TSMC documents AlN/AlOₓ/SiOC/AlOₓ above Cu, with AlN blocking Cu diffusion, and a simpler AlN/SiOC/AlOₓ variant that omits one AlOx film. [9] Levels with different opening sizes, aspect ratios, pattern densities and cap materials need different etch margins. A double AlOx stop is useful where another protected endpoint justifies the added processing. The extra film adds formation, selective opening and cleaning steps, plus another set of interfaces to control adhesion, moisture, and stress. These blanket films are opened through the existing via pattern, so each film does not require another lithography mask. AlOₓ adds parasitic capacitance when it replaces lower-k dielectric; two thin AlOₓ films can nevertheless contain less AlOₓ than one thick film. Total thickness, placement, and theintermediate dielectric determine the electrical cost. Deposition chemistry also changes AlOx permittivity and residual hydroxyl content, which can oxidize the underlying metal. [7], [8], [10], [11] The backside stack separates into relatively fine BM0-BM2 wiring near the devices and coarser BM3-BM5 power distribution. The largest pitch increase occurs between BM2 and BM3. BM0’s pitch closely matches the logic-row height, fitting local power delivery to the cell rows. Higher levels aggregate current through larger conductors: routing density becomes less important than low resistance and current capacity as the network approaches the package. This hierarchy provides wide power wiring for the power delivery network without consuming scarce frontside signal-routing resources. [3] The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WE’RE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. Frontside Interconnects Intel 18A combines Mo-lined W contacts and nano-TSVs with a separate backside Cu power network. Samsung SF2 keeps power on the frontside, using Ti-based contact interfaces and Ta-based barriers and Co liners around Cu wiring. In 18A standard-cell rows, backside power rails supply the devices through nano-TSVs within the cells, freeing frontside routing resources. Samsung’s M0 accommodates both power and signal connections. From the device toward M0, the connection runs through a Ti-based S/D interface, W contact fill, a Mo-lined W via, and the Cu M0 wire. Mo supplies a conductive nucleation and adhesion layer for W, replacing the resistive TiN liner used in conventional W integration. This increases the effective conduction volume within the feature while retaining W fill and its established polishing, cleaning and etching processes. Intel’s Mo/W patent describes this integration tradeoff. The nano-TSV uses the same Mo-lined W construction in the backside supply path. [12] The move from TiN to Mo is an incremental change. While a full Co or Mo fill can also reduce the volume lost to liners in very small features, it requires new integration schemes that increase complexity and risk. Cu remains attractive for wider wires due to its low resistance. As wires and vias shrink, the diffusion barrier consumes an increasing fraction of their cross-section. [12], [12], [14] Intel uses Co/Ru liners at M0-M1, Co at M2-M4, and Nb at M5-M9. The lower-level liners help Cu adhere and reduce void formation during trench fills. Applied Materials’ Endura has new thermal control that facilitate wetting process, so the thin film continuity is good enough that good capillary pressure will drive Cu atoms to the via bottom without voiding. Intel’s choice to use Nb is particularly interesting. Intel’s Nb patent describes a conductive diffusion barrier intended to reduce the barrier’s contribution to resistance relative to conventional Ta-based barriers, particularly at via bottoms where all current crosses the barrier. The patent pairs Nb in coarser levels with the option of lower-cost PVD processing. [15], [16] The upper metal layers support thicker barriers formed through physical vapor deposition (PVD) despite its worse coverage and uniformity. Meanwhile, the lower metal layers require thinner barriers deposited through conformal atomic layer deposition (ALD). Co/Ru adds another material interface and requires controlled deposition and Cu fill. Changing liners and barriers by metal layer allows Intel to optimize interconnect resistance, process complexity, and reliability. [15, 16] RibbonFET, Intel’s name for its gate-all-around FETs (GAAFETs), replaces the FinFET’s vertical fins with four stacked horizontal silicon nanosheets, allowing the gate to surround the channel on every side. The path to GAAFET begins with the planar transistor. A planar MOSFET places the gate above the channel between its source and drain. Pairing an NMOS with a PMOS transistor creates a CMOS inverter, in which the NMOS pulls the output low for a high input, and the PMOS pulls it high for a low input. The gate must retain electrostatic control of the channel to ensure clean switching. As gate lengths shrank, the drain began to compete with the gate for that control, increasing off-state leakage. Electrostatic control was restored through an architectural evolution that raised the channel into a vertical fin and wrapping the gate around three sides. Called “FinFET”, this new architecture packed more effective channel width into a smaller footprint. Further scaling made it harder to maintain both drive current and leakage within smaller cells, and reintroduced the same problems planar MOSFETs faced. Nanosheet GAAFETs close the fourth side by replacing the vertical fin with a stack of horizontal nanosheets, each surrounded by the gate. The tighter electrostatic control suppresses leakage at shorter gate lengths while stacking adds effective channel width within the cell footprint. In a FinFET process, channel width changes in discrete steps as designers must add or remove whole fins. Nanosheet width can instead be adjusted continuously within the process’s design rules. Wider sheets increase drive current, while narrower sheets reduce capacitance at the cost of drive current. Intel 18A uses stacks of four nanosheets each and varies their widths across logic and SRAM. At the process level, adding more sheets to each stack increases effective channel width and drive current, but complicates fabrication. RibbonFET vs MBCFET Samsung began GAAFET production in 2022 with SF3E, following with SF3 and now SF2. Its ‘MBCFET’ provides a useful structural comparison with Intel’s first RibbonFET implementation. [17] STEEL is digging deeper into SF2, used in the Exynos 2600, and TSMC’s GAAFET N2, used in Apple’s A20 Pro, in upcoming newsletter articles. We’re throwing some teasers on X. Let’s compare Samsung SF2’s MBCFET with Intel 18A’s RibbonFET. Subscribe Even to the untrained eye, Intel’s extra nanosheet is obvious. Intel stacks four ribbons to Samsung’s three. Samsung’s sheets are much wider in these fields, so both sheet count and width matter to the available channel perimeter. Sheet width also changes which silicon surfaces carry current. On conventional (001) silicon, wide nanosheets emphasize the broad top and bottom surfaces, favoring electron transport; the larger sidewall contribution in a narrow sheet favors hole transport. Thinner sheets improve gate control but increase confinement and scattering. This makes width and thickness part of the NMOS/PMOS balance, alongside strain and threshold voltage. [18], [19] GAAFET designs like 18A use different work-function-metal (WFM) stacks for NMOS and PMOS. Around each ribbon, a thin SiOx interfacial layer separates the silicon channel from the HfOx high-k dielectric, with La providing dipole tuning and the WFM wrapping the dielectric. NMOS uses a TiAl-based stack, while PMOS uses TiN WFM. W fills the remaining gate trench, providing a lower-resistivity path where the work-function layers are no longer needed. In this field, the PMOS stacks leave room for W between ribbons, while the NMOS stacks occupy more of those gaps. A silicon-based dielectric marks the P/N boundary, allowing the PMOS and NMOS gates, sharing the same gate trench, to be processed sequentially. Fast logic paths, retention circuits, and SRAM need a family of threshold options. Changing threshold without substantially changing device dimensions, capacitance or fabrication complexity is valuable. FinFET processes typically use different work-function-metal stacks. In a four-ribbon GAA stack, the narrow sheet-to-sheet gap limits how much WFM can fit around each channel. La in the gate dielectric creates interfacial dipoles at the SiOx/HfOx boundary, shifting effective work function and tuning threshold voltage. This gives Intel another control alongside its NMOS and PMOS WFM stacks. Low-threshold devices improve critical-path drive; higher thresholds reduce leakage elsewhere. Dipole tuning is especially useful in GAA because it changes threshold without consuming the narrow intersheet gap with thicker WFM. Precise control of La incorporation, diffusion and interface quality has long been a challenge, limiting viability in high volume production but is now seen from every leading-edge foundry. Intel’s patent describes depositing a dipole-forming oxide above HfOx and annealing it toward the interfacial oxide before completing the work-function and fill metals. This separates threshold tuning from the space available for metal. Newer research addresses the thermal cost: imec’s 2026 dipole-middle research inserts the shifter between two HfOx depositions, shortening the diffusion path while protecting SiOx during patterning. [20], [21]Matched-cut EDS, Intel 18A (left) vs. Samsung SF2 (right). Intel retains raised source/drain epi beneath its contacts, while Samsung recesses W deep into the epi to form a V-shaped Ti-lined interface. The deeper contact increases metal-to-semiconductor area and shortens the current path from the lower sheets, reducing contact and spreading resistance. It also removes epi volume and brings the contact etch closer to the channel ends. Retaining more epi preserves the material available for strain transfer, especially from SiGe into PMOS. These geometries balance contact access against stress engineering and etch margin. [22], [23] Samsung stacks three sheets to Intel’s four ribbons, and both processes use sheet width to tune drive strength. In our Samsung cross-sections, widths range roughly from 19 to 30 nm in the NPU rows and 37 to 50 nm in the CU cell. The Samsung nanosheets taper, with the widest sheet at the bottom and the narrowest at the top. Both processes use HfOx gate dielectric and Ti-based work-function stacks, with Al in the NMOS stack. In the Samsung devices shown here, the dielectric and WFM occupy the intersheet gaps, leaving W above the top sheet. Intel’s PMOS stack leaves more room between ribbons, and W fills those gaps while the thicker NMOS stack leaves W mainly in the upper trench. Gate-stack EDS maps. The W between Intel’s PMOS ribbons provides a conductive path close to the lower gates. Where WFM fills the entire gap, the gate still surrounds the channel, but voltage reaches it through the more resistive work-function films. Thinner WFM and dipole tuning preserve room for low-resistivity fill; Mo and Ru are alternative fill metals being developed for further scaling. [24] A masked, sequential WFM flow explains the different gate heights and inter-nanosheet fill. The proposed sequence below shows how separate NMOS and PMOS work-function steps produce that geometry. Enabled by the BSPDN process, Intel replaces the dense-logic silicon subfin with dielectric, removing the parasitic conduction path below the ribbons and reducing substrate-related capacitance. A retained silicon body as in classical, non-SOI, planar and FinFET designs needs junction and punchthrough-stop engineering to suppress leakage. Dielectric isolation makes that leakage less sensitive to the subfin doping profile but adds removal and fill steps. It also weakens the direct thermal path through silicon, making the contacts, metal stacks and package more important for heat extraction. [24], [26] Fluorine is concentrated around selected Intel device structures in the maps. WF6 is a standard precursor for W nucleation and fill, while barrier films protect adjacent dielectrics from fluorine attack. Low-fluorine W processes reduce the residual-F burden. Chloride-based precursors avoid introducing F during W deposition, but require control of chlorine attack, nucleation and fill quality. The integration target is a continuous, low-resistance W path with a thin protective liner and minimal chemical damage to the surrounding stack. [20], [27], [28] The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WE’RE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. We measured cell height, gate pitch, metal geometry, and ribbon dimensions at the XTEM sites shown below. The tables group these dimensions by site and device polarity. Our “sheet cuts” cross the silicon channel and show the ribbons end-on. “gate cuts” run along the channel through successive gates. The 18A logic cell dimensions point to a five-track logic library while the N3E and Intel 3 cell dimensions evidence a seven-track logic library. The DDR-PHY uses wider M0 wires and much larger spacing than core logic. That trades routing density for lower wire resistance and weaker coupling between neighboring nets. The geometry suits the current delivery and coupling requirements of analog, clock, and I/O circuitry. PowerVia lets 18A combine a compact cell height with wider M0 geometry by moving the main power rails off the signal-routing tracks. That relaxes local wire scaling while preserving a small cell footprint. Cell height and gate pitch set the geometric density; pin access and routability determine how much of it a real block can use. [29] The biggest takeaway from our gate-pitch measurements is that Intel 18A compute logic and TSMC N3E GPU logic have similar density in the Bohr representative-cell model. The 18A example is 18.6% denser than the Intel 3 GPU example. Gate pitches are nearly identical across the three sites, so cell height drives most of the difference. The Bohr model combines a four-transistor NAND2 spanning three gate pitches and a 32-transistor scan flip-flop (SFF) spanning nineteen pitches, weighting their densities 60:40. The sensitivity column shows how independently changing cell height and gate pitch by ±1 nm changes the result. This compares representative cell geometries; whole-die density also depends on cell mix and placement. The 18A P-core gives M0 substantially more metal cross section than the N3E vector engine. Treating each profile as a trapezoid gives 2.63 times the area per line and 1.84 times the area after normalization by routing pitch. The larger section reduces the geometric contribution to line resistance and lowers current density for a given current. Taller and wider wires also add capacitance, so circuit delay depends on the balance of resistance and capacitance. The DDR-PHY has less metal area per routing width than the 18A core fields, while remaining above N3E. [30] Area = height × (top CD + bottom CD) / 2, including liners. Area/pitch normalizes by routing width. Taper is the symmetric sidewall angle from vertical, with the largest angle belonging to the DDR-PHY. Compute tile The measurements show how ribbon dimensions and gate-stack geometry vary across the compute tile and between NMOS and PMOS to balance channel drive, gate load and the space needed for the dielectric/WFM stack across logic, SRAM and the DDR-PHY. Width mainly changes available channel perimeter; thickness also changes electrostatic control and carrier confinement. Gate-stack thickness then determines the space left for low-resistivity fill P-core and LP E-core logic Both the P-core and LP E-core use multiple nanosheet widths. Widths are measured on high-magnification XTEMs while wider-field images demonstrate additional width choices within the LP E-core. Multiple widths are expected even within an LP E-core. Timing-critical paths, buffers and cells with different fanout need different drive strengths. The lower-magnification fields show this width diversity beyond the sites quantified in the table. L2 and L3 SRAM GAA gives SRAM designers another way to balance the pull-up (PU), pass-gate (PG), and pull-down (PD) transistors. FinFET bitcells set device strength through fin count while GAA adds nanosheet width as a sizing knob. In a 6T SRAM cell, a strong pull-down relative to the pass-gate limits read disturbance, while a strong pass-gate relative to the pull-up improves writability. During a write, the pass-gate and write driver pull the node storing “1” below the inverter trip point. During a read, the pull-down holds the node storing “0” low. Bias, threshold voltage, mismatch and assist circuitry set the remaining margin. FinFET high-current cells commonly use a PU:PG:PD fin-count pattern of 1:2:2, a device-sizing ratio rather than a current ratio. Ribbon width lets Intel balance SRAM strengths without adding whole fins. The L2 cell uses its narrowest ribbons for PU and widest for PD, improving writability and read stability respectively. Intel’s disclosed HCC operates without assist; its denser HDC uses negative-bitline write assist. Pulling the selected bitline briefly below ground increases pass-gate overdrive so it can overpower the pull-up at lower supply voltage. That buys density and low voltage writability at the cost of boosting circuitry, switching energy, and additional voltage stress that must be controlled. [31], [32] Four rectangular ribbons give the perimeter = 8 × (width + thickness), before corner rounding. PG/PU is 1.49 and PD/PG is 1.16. The L3 structures closely resemble L2 in layout and cell height. Fewer L3 nanosheet widths are tabulated because fewer high-magnification images were available. DDR PHY The DDR-PHY trades density for controlled analog behavior and reliable off-chip signaling. It contains drivers, receivers, delay circuits, and calibration logic that set drive strength, sampling time, and voltage margin. Repeated four-sheet devices with similar widths fit the use of regular transistor units for matching and programmable drive. Its wider local wiring provides room for current delivery and separation of sensitive signals, while consuming more area than a dense core-logic grid. The layout serves the memory channel’s electrical requirements as well as digital logic density. [33] The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WE’RE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. Intel 3 GPU devices Vector engine logic Intel 3’s XVE logic uses two-fin PMOS and NMOS devices with power rails in M0. Its cell height and M0 pitch give a seven-track geometry, two tracks more than the 18A logic. One-fin groups also appear among the two-fin devices. Intel 3 L2 SRAM The Intel 3 L2 SRAM uses the familiar HCC sizing pattern: one PU fin, two PG fins, and two PD fins. N3E GPU devices Vector engine logic The N3E XVE field contains repeated two-fin devices with seven-track cell geometry. N3E remains a FinFET process, giving Panther Lake a direct FinFET-to-RibbonFET comparison. N3E L2 SRAM The N3E L2 SRAM uses the same PU:PG:PD fin-count pattern of 1:2:2. Panther Lake-U follows Lunar Lake’s floorplan quite closely. Both pair 4 P-cores with 4 LP E-cores and NPU, media and display engines in similar locations. Lunar Lake also uses Xe2, the direct predecessor to Panther Lake’s Xe3 GPU. This makes Lunar Lake the most direct basis for our comparisons. Arrow Lake differs in core count and uses the older Xe-LPG GPU architecture, so we only use it where it offers a more direct component-level comparison. Compute tile Panther Lake compute-tile floorplans remain sparse even months after launch. Intel 18A’s backside metal and dielectric stack must be removed without damaging the underlying structures before a clean transistor-level floorplan can be imaged. Most published die shots hide or heavily process the background, but we are quite proud of the die shot we achieved and are excited to show the work we have done. We measured the areas of the key components on the compute tile and compared them with their Lunar Lake predecessors on TSMC N3B. These help us to capture changes in block area and compare the two chips across process nodes and designs. Our total tile areas exclude the scribe-line area. The compute-plus-GPU subtotal below uses the PTL-U compute tile and GT1 GPU; it excludes the I/O tile and passive base. Individual block areas use the boundaries marked on the floorplans The compute-plus-GPU row is recomputed from the displayed PTL-U and GT1 areas. Component rows use their stated per-region counts and are not an additive partition of the whole tile. The P-core area remains almost unchanged between Lunar Lake and Panther Lake, despite L2 capacity increasing from 2.5 MiB to 3 MiB. Arrow Lake uses the same Lion Cove core as Lunar Lake but also has a 3 MiB L2. Cougar Cove fits 20% more L2 into the same P-core area. The larger private cache keeps more of each core’s working set close to its execution units, reducing access to shared L3 and DRAM. Extra capacity adds storage leakage and lookup energy, so designers balance it against avoided lower-level accesses. The shared P-core L3 cache also shrank by 14.8%. [2] Cougar Cove combines a similar footprint with Intel’s reported power-efficiency improvements. RibbonFET’s tighter channel control reduces leakage, while PowerVia reduces supply droop and allows tighter voltage guardbands. [1] Darkmont’s four-core LP E-core cluster is 5.0% smaller than Skymont’s on Lunar Lake, with most of the reduction in its L2 regions. The 1 MiB region shrank by 8.4% and the 1.5 MiB region by 14.9%. The tag arrays also use one fewer visible row. Tags identify which memory addresses the data array holds, so rearranging them changes the cache’s layout and wiring without requiring less data capacity. [2] The LP E-cores share one L2. This pools capacity and avoids duplicating all the cache machinery, but the four cores contend for its banks and bandwidth. Their separate cluster also keeps light work away from the performance cluster and its L3, allowing that larger domain to sleep. [1], [2] Cache area includes more than the storage cells. Tags identify each line, decoders select rows, sense amplifiers read the small bitline signal, and wires connect to the banks. Splitting an array into smaller sections shortens wordlines and bitlines, improving access speed, but duplicates peripheral circuits. Panther Lake’s smaller cache regions therefore reflect the complete memory implementation, including how much of each region is devoted to storage. [34] Unlike Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake, Panther Lake has no separate SoC tile. The NPU, LP E-cores, memory controllers, PHYs, media and display engines now share the compute tile. This removes an active die and keeps CPU memory traffic on one die. The cost is moving PHY and I/O-related circuitry onto 18A: drivers, receivers and analog circuits must still meet external voltage, loading and signal-integrity requirements, so their area does not shrink like dense digital logic. [1], [2] The biggest shrink comes from the NPU, which occupies 36.9% less area. NPU 5 consolidates the same total INT8 MAC count into half as many neural compute engines. Each of the three NCEs has a larger MAC array to make the complete NCE envelope 22.6% larger than an NPU 4 engine. Consolidation also halves the number of scratchpads and SHAVE DSPs, from 12 to 6. The MAC array handles matrix multiplication and convolution, while SHAVE executes vector and custom operations that fit the array poorly. [1], [2], [35] The paired floorplans identify each NCE envelope and its scratchpad, MAC, and SHAVE regions. Each measured MAC polygon is counted once per NCE in the area accounting below. The scratchpads store weights, activations, and intermediate results near the MAC arrays, allowing repeated use without fetching them again from DRAM. Halving their number delivers the largest measured area saving but leaves less local storage for the same total MAC count. Layers that no longer fit locally require smaller working tiles or more transfers of intermediate data. The benefit depends on keeping the enlarged arrays busy while managing that tighter storage budget. [36] NPU 5 also adds native FP8. Using half the operand width of FP16 reduces storage and transfer demand, helping workloads fit the smaller local memory budget. Lower precision and format-dependent range make scaling and model validation part of deployment. Hardware activation functions further reduce work that would otherwise occupy the programmable DSPs. [1], [2] Microsoft requires an NPU to deliver at least 40 TOPS for Copilot+ PCs. Both Lunar Lake and Panther Lake meet this threshold, but Panther Lake uses significantly less silicon. GPU tiles Panther Lake is Intel’s first product with Xe3, its latest GPU architecture. It offers two different GPU tiles: a smaller GT1 tile with 4 Xe3 cores on Intel 3 and a larger GT2 tile with 12 Xe3 cores on TSMC N3E. Panther Lake allows us to compare the same GPU architecture across both Intel 3 and TSMC N3E. Wildcat Lake adds a third Xe3 implementation on Intel 18A. A future newsletter will detail Xe3 and its implementation differences across all three process nodes. GT2 scales Xe3 to a different physical layout, with render slices arranged vertically instead of GT1’s horizontal arrangement. Slice placement sets the distances to shared cache banks and the D2D interface. Those wires consume area and add delay, so scaling the number of Xe cores also requires a new balance of cache placement, routing and timing. [1] What’s immediately obvious is that the GT2 tile on TSMC N3E has much smaller Xe cores than GT1. These block areas include logic, caches, and routing. An Xe core on the GT1 tile is ~69% larger than one on Lunar Lake, and ~55% larger than one on GT2. Intel 3 therefore uses substantially more area per Xe core. The block-area gap exceeds the measured logic and SRAM density gaps, bringing routing, timing targets, cell mix, and floorplan allocation into the comparison. The measured vector/matrix engine region is almost unchanged between Lunar Lake and Panther Lake’s GT2 tile. Xe3 retains eight 512-bit vector engines and eight 2048-bit XMX engines per core. Its gains also come from feeding those engines more effectively: more resident threads hide stalls, and variable register allocation lets shaders trade registers per thread against the number of threads kept active. [1] The shared L1/SLM capacity increased by 33% from 192 KiB to 256 KiB, while its area increased only 5%, raising effective density by 27%. L1 retains reused cache lines, while software-managed SLM lets a thread group share data locally. Both reduce traffic to more distant memory. Allocating more SLM per group can also limit how many groups reside on a core at once. [1], [37] The GT1 tile carries 4 MiB of L2 against 16 MiB on the GT2 tile. GT1 divides its L2 cache into four 1 MiB banks, while GT2 uses eight 2 MiB banks. Each bank contains 128 macros, but each N3E macro stores 16 KiB, twice the Intel 3 macro’s 8 KiB capacity. The N3E macro is only 54% larger while holding twice as many bits, giving it 30% higher density: ~23.7 Mbit/mm² versus 18.3 Mbit/mm². Including bank-level circuitry, the gap widens to ~16.9 Mbit/mm² on GT2 versus ~10.4 Mbit/mm² on GT1. GT2 gains density with its macros storing more bits per unit area, and those macros occupy more of each cache bank. Larger macros spread decoder and sense-amplifier overhead across more storage, while a more compact bank layout reduces the share spent on control and routing. The compromise is longer wordlines and bitlines that carry more capacitance. [34] I/O tile Panther Lake uses two I/O tile variants, both fabricated on TSMC N6. The smaller one provides 4 PCIe 5.0 and 8 PCIe 4.0 lanes and serves lower-tier systems as well as those without a discrete GPU, while the larger one adds 8 PCIe 5.0 lanes, bringing the total to 20 lanes, for discrete-GPU connectivity. Panther Lake SKUs with the larger 10- or 12-Xe GPUs use the smaller I/O tile. [38] The smaller I/O tile adds a PCIe 4.0 block and a Thunderbolt block to Lunar Lake’s I/O layout, providing four additional PCIe 4.0 lanes and another Thunderbolt 4 port. Its repeated N6 blocks retain nearly identical areas and layouts. Reusing these proven PHYs and controllers avoids porting and requalifying external interfaces on 18A, where faster digital logic offers less benefit to circuits constrained by the off-chip link. [38] SemiAnalysis’s teardown lab (STEEL) dives deep into the world’s advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. We’re hiring technical experts from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page. Panther Lake offers scalability and modularity through its disaggregated packaging that partition compute, GPU, and I/O silicon into separate tiles allowing for a suite of tile configurations. This partitioning makes the package part of Intel’s node economics as it determines how much leading-edge wafer area each product consumes, which functions can remain on other processes, and how much configuration freedom Intel can offer from a shared set of tiles. Furthermore, fabricating the compute and GPU tiles separately confines the new 18A process to the compute tile and allows graphics and I/O to use other, more established, and more cost-effective processes. For Panther Lake, the GPU and I/O tiles are assembled alongside the compute tile on a passive silicon base using Foveros-S. Intel’s current technology brief lists a nominal 36 µm pitch for Foveros-S. Through-silicon vias (TSVs) in the base connect the fine wiring above to the larger package connections below. The functional tiles sit side by side on that passive base in a 2.5D configuration. [39] Our cross-section through the compute and GPU tiles shows the package’s wiring hierarchy. Microbumps connect each active tile to the passive silicon base; its fine redistribution layer (RDL) carries the short, dense tile-to-tile links. TSVs carry connections through the base to the package substrate, which fans them out to the much coarser motherboard solder joints. The base supplies interconnect, while computation remains in the active tiles above it. [39] At the compute-tile edge, the higher-magnification inset shows a local microbump spacing of approximately 25.24 µm and a feature width of 12.33 µm. These local spacings are finer than Intel’s nominal Foveros-S value. The X-ray fields further confirm tighter neighboring bumps, consistent across every die-to-die area found on each tile. Additional X-ray analysis is offered after the paywall. Putting the memory controller beside the CPU removes the D2D transfer that CPU memory requests required in Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake. This avoids the extra transmitter, receiver, and link traversal, saving interface energy and latency. Panther Lake’s separate GPU still crosses a D2D link to reach DRAM, so its larger local caches also help contain package traffic. [1], [40] Smaller dies are less likely to contain a random fatal defect, and screening them before assembly prevents one bad tile from consuming a complete package of good silicon. Reuse also spreads design and qualification work across more products. Against those gains, Intel pays for the passive base, D2D circuits, extra bonding and test steps, and losses during assembly. Cost per working product across the portfolio captures the combined effect of wafer yield, reuse, test, and assembly. [29] Wildcat Lake packaging Intel launched Core Series 3, formerly Wildcat Lake, on 16 April 2026 for value mobile and edge systems. Wildcat Lake keeps 18A but removes the passive base and combines more functions on one die to simplify the package. The two products therefore reveal two distinct ways to commercialize the same leading-edge process. [41] Wildcat Lake’s 18A die combines up to two Cougar Cove P-cores, four Darkmont LP E-cores, two Xe3 cores and a smaller NPU. A separate platform-controller die supplies I/O, connected through UCIe, Intel’s first processor implementation of the standard. Consolidating graphics remove a tile boundary and the passive base, reducing assembly complexity for a modest-bandwidth value product. It also ties CPU and graphics scaling to the same die, giving up Panther Lake’s ability to swap in a much larger GPU. [42], [43] In July 2021, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger set out an ambitious process roadmap aimed at regaining performance leadership by 2025, later described as five nodes in four years. Five years and one CEO later, Intel’s comeback story is not as unambiguously positive as Pat may have hoped. [44], [45] Intel once set the pace for process technology, bringing high-k metal gate technology and FinFETs into volume production years ahead of the rest of the industry. Its 22 nm FinFET process reached consumers with Ivy Bridge in 2012. [46] Intel’s integrated device manufacturing (IDM) model allowed its architects and process engineers to co-optimize products and processes. Starting with Sandy Bridge, Intel dominated x86, while AMD struggled with Bulldozer. That lead faltered at 14 nm and broke at 10 nm. Intel targeted a massive 2.7× density increase, but the node arrived years late and required several revisions before it could support Intel’s full lineup. This delay forced Intel to stretch 14 nm across six generations, while TSMC moved ahead in process technology and AMD recovered in x86. By 2019, Intel was still shipping 14 nm across most of its product stack, with its 10 nm client ramp focused on Ice Lake mobile processors. Meanwhile, TSMC was shipping N7 and N7+, and AMD’s Zen 2 compute chiplets used N7 to raise core counts and improve efficiency. Intel’s process failures were central to its decline, but unsound business decisions furthered their downward slide. Product delays compounded product mistakes, pushing client, server, and FPGA roadmaps off schedule. Several attempts to enter AI (Nervana and Gaudi) and networking (Tofino) also failed to establish lasting businesses. Intel’s recovery has focused on consumer CPUs and advanced packaging. Tiger Lake, Alder Lake, Lunar Lake and now Panther Lake have restored Intel’s consumer roadmap. On the process side, Intel 4 shipped with Meteor Lake, Intel 3 with Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest, and Intel 18A with Panther Lake. Intel has also made advanced packaging part of its foundry offering. However, Intel is still playing catch-up in servers. Several Xeon generations arrived years late and trailed contemporary AMD and Arm server CPUs in performance, efficiency, and core count. The process roadmap is back, but Intel does not hold the same process-technology leadership position it held prior to 10 nm. The introduction of gate-all-around nanosheets and backside power delivery are two of the biggest changes to transistor integration in a decade. Intel took on both changes at once: 18A paired its first RibbonFET with PowerVia in Panther Lake. Panther Lake is a substantial manufacturing milestone. Our cross-sections show how RibbonFET and PowerVia reshape local contacts and wiring, while the floorplans show where architectural consolidation and process choices save area. A sustained competitive lead depends on product performance, cost, yield, and the next implementation. The SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown lab breaks down advanced datacenter and AI hardware. To learn more about our pipeline or to commission a teardown, contact sales@semianalysis.com. WE’RE HIRING: Architecture, floorplan, packaging, manufacturing, and labs experts. Opportunities from system to transistor and everywhere in between. Check out our Careers page.. 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September Monthly Review: Health MCP Guy?
For all the time I spend talking about APIs and data exchange, this newsletter has had embarrassingly little interoperability of its own. It’s old-school SaaS, baby - UI or bust. Not all of that is my fault! Substack, for all its popularity, is (as mentioned before) really frustrating as my system of record. The primary user it optimizes towards is the reader, whose attention feeds the app, the Notes feed, and the recommendation network that Substack is actually selling. Health API Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe They’re falling into the same trap that Medium once sprinted into, albeit at a much more glacial speed. Younger generations may not remember (or never knew) it, but Medium once lured publications like The Ringer and Signal v. Noise onto its platform, only to lose them as it rebuilt itself around a paywall and an algorithmic feed. Substack’s original pitch circa 2020 was the antidote (you own your list), but every new feed feature chips away at it. I get it: writers are generic supply in the eyes of the Substack product team. Generic supply follows demand, so the consistent pressure on the PMs is to generate demand, which leads to every product cycle going toward discovery (Notes, recommendations, the app, live video). The end result lackluster author tools (laggy and broken analytics are truly crippling) all despite the premium price point. The archive is where it crosses from authorial gripes to actual reader impact, though. Across Substack and LinkedIn, I’ve published 1,218 posts and nearly 900,000 words since 2018. Substack’s native search can see only the 464 posts that live on Substack, and even there it’s woefully inadequate at surfacing relevant content (even for the guy who wrote it)! Readers have the same problem, writ large. Ask the Archive Fixing search (for both my readers and my own use) turned out to be extremely non-trivial, unfortunately: There’s no public API for readers to access content RSS exists for new content notification, but it only carries the 20 most recent posts and cuts paid ones off at the preview The only Substack MCP is an admin tool for analytics The export exists for authors, but it’s painfully awkward and slow. So I built something to work around that: the Health API Guy MCP. It’s a private MCP server holding the full text of everything I’ve written across Substack and LinkedIn. Add it to Claude or ChatGPT as a connector and you can ask things like: It pairs keyword search (for acronyms and case names, of which we have many) with semantic search. Every post is also labeled by topic, form, and court case, so you can pull a lawsuit’s (or multiple cases’) entire docket across Substack and LinkedIn in one query: Hail, Healthapiguyhydra This is also a bit of me eating my own cooking. I’ve spent the year arguing that headless healthcare is arriving and that developers want primitives over abstractions. Last week in Hail, Benihydra, I watched Salesforce plug its platform into Claude and bet that the records underneath outlive whatever interface sits on top: Salesforce must believe that the Hydra’s immortal head is the records, permissions, and business logic (in that they will survive whatever happens to the interface). It felt a bit hypocritical to keep my own archive behind a Substack search bar. The archive is the body. Substack is one head, and now whatever tool you might use is another. Will the EHRs follow my lead? Probably not imminently, but one can hope! Why Founding Members Only The MCP is available to Founding Member subscribers. A few reasons: It costs money and time to run. Hosting, the database, Clerk usage and AI compute for search and labeling are significant operational costs (that increase with usage). Substack gives me no way to automate access. There’s no API to check whether someone is a paid subscriber, so every user is manual operations for now. It’s a beta. We’ll need to improve things and parts will break. I’d rather they break for a small group of dedicated readers who will tell me about it. The Founding tier deserved a real benefit. Until now it was mostly a generous tip. Now it comes with something. If you’re already a Founding Member, reply to this email with the address you’d like provisioned. If you’re not and want in, upgrade here. Larger teams (such as companies) can get access too: group subscriptions at the Founding tier come with the group discount. The admin for the subscription can reply with the list of addresses to provision. Get 20% off a group subscription Pricing Founding membership is now a flat $200 a year, replacing the old suggested $150 that readers could adjust. Existing Founding Members will have access grandfathered in at their previous rate. Month in Review Articles Published Make Networks Dumb Again (Sep 11): AI is making old analog networks cheaper to use and flooding them with machine traffic in the process. A plea for agent-native rails with the intelligence at the endpoints, and for Washington to drag them to ubiquity. Interoperability, Unbuttoned (Sep 29): Interoperability is a series of workflows in a trenchcoat, and this post finally takes the trenchcoat off. A color-coded map shows which provider workflows went digital, which are fragmented, and which still run on fax. Video Content Antitrust’s System of Record Problem (Sep 3): The FTC’s investigation into Epic prompted a ninety-minute webinar, now posted with chapters and a smoothed transcript. We get into why market definition, missing B2B share data, and the SSNIP test leave antitrust poorly suited to systems of record, plus why information blocking may be doing more than any pending lawsuit. The Information Exchange: Cerner Milking Edition (Sep 18): This was so fucking fun. Ryan Tucker, Ryan Brickner, Brad Thorson, and I try an Around the Horn format, complete with points, penalties, and a mute button. We debate whether Oracle Health is dead, who would actually buy Cerner (IBM enters the chat), p(Doom), and why the front desk still hands you a clipboard. Regulatory Ask Not What Your Network Can Do (Sep 23): CDC’s RFI on public health data intermediaries lists use cases already served, unevenly, by eCR, lab reporting, IZ Gateway, and syndromic surveillance. The real opportunity sits in one question about AI: a network that can handle the next emergency without another interface project. Court cases Particle v. Epic: The Naughty Schoolteacher (Sep 4): After a summer-long vigil, the answer on Epic’s early summary judgment bid is two paragraphs and a remedial assignment. Particle advances to the next grade, and market definition gets another year of discovery. The Epic Discovery Files (Sep 8): Texas’s motions to compel arrive with a 251-page appendix of requests, objections, and meet-and-confer letters with Cravath. Inside: Epic using generative AI for document review, denied interoperability requests in scope, and Noerr-Pennington raised against lobbying discovery. Epic v. Health Gorilla: “Working as Designed” (Sep 9): Epic wants nothing to do with the data breach MDL, and explaining why puts fresh discovery on the public docket. The spiciest allegation: Health Gorilla told GuardDog to scrub its law firm business from its website instead of cutting off access. Veeva v. Epic: Legal Bypass Surgery (Sep 15): Veeva asks the Wisconsin Supreme Court to skip the Court of Appeals, while law professors and three policy groups line up as amici. Meanwhile, Epic’s lawyers apologize for another round of citation errors, including a quote that never existed. Texas v. Epic: Behind the Black Bars (Sep 17): The court portal served up Epic’s unredacted filings, revealing a $5 million document review budget and the AI workflow behind it. Also inside: the 200-plus company names Texas wants searched, and one very expensive Zoom invitation. OpenEvidence v. Doximity: Consequences Will Follow (Sep 25): OpenEvidence tells the court it will not comply with a discovery order, and its own lawyers at Quinn Emanuel say they won’t defend the choice. Add years of Slack reported unrecoverable, and Rule 37 sanctions come into view. Health Tech Keeps Choosing Violence (Sep 28): Doximity moves to end OpenEvidence’s case, Epic asks Texas to show its work, and a sleepy Audacious Inquiry patent fight sprouts antitrust and information blocking counterclaims. The main event is a long-sealed Cognizant v. Infosys ruling that hints where system of record antitrust claims can survive. EHRs One Verb for Oracle Health (Sep 14): Oracle’s earnings call quantifies every data center to the decimal point, while Oracle Health gets a single verb: “accelerate.” Panning the few healthcare mentions turns up an agentic care management system, a research-to-care ledger play, and the question of whether healthcare gets Larry’s patience. Epic’s Forretress Under Siege (Sep 30): Judy Faulkner tells a panel Epic paused hundreds of projects to harden its software and calls it a “shame,” while a spokesperson insists the roadmap hasn’t changed. Project Glasswing, a Pokémon-branded QAN sprint, and a trove of Jodel grievances reconcile the two Epics and preview the Jevons paradox coming for all software. Industry Analysis Scanning for a Network (Sep 1): Scan.com raises $220M to build the imaging network labs never got, speedrunning Zocdoc’s consumer-to-B2B pivot. Its wedge to network density may be the most American one available: personal injury litigation. The Front Desk Wants the Damn Whole Building (Sep 16): Hello Patient buys Converse Health, pushing its AI front desk into referrals, chart work, and prior auth. The copilot categories keep blurring, and your distribution partner is still your final boss. Cross-industry Comparisons A Different Patchwork Quilt (Sep 10): Healthcare loves to envy open banking, but the US version has no mandate, a toll booth at Chase, and data quality problems of its own. The grass isn’t greener; it’s another American patchwork quilt, and perhaps a worse one. Hail, Benihydra (Sep 21): Salesforce brings its platform into Claude, Slack, and its own agent, inviting the interfaces that might replace it. Cut off one head and more grow back, so long as the records underneath stay put. Living on A Trade Secret Prayer (Sep 22): Six credit unions are suing Fiserv, the Epic of core banking, by claiming their own member records as trade secrets. Banking has no Cures Act, so its lawyers reach for legal alchemy that healthcare has already tried. Other News None this month External Media Nabla Accelerate NYC: I kicked off fall conference season at Nabla’s Accelerate event in New York, where Delphine Groll opened by asking the room to picture the company it wants to become and the one it doesn’t. I liked her framework of bureaucracy, fear, and ego as the blockers. I also love vendor conferences/events in general - different vibe than industry biggies. Healthcare 101 with Nikhil Krishnan: I briefly guest lectured Out-Of-Pocket’s Healthcare 101 class. Appreciated Nikhil’s takeaways cover whether AI doctors can query HIEs, why healthcare’s data-liberation rules beat most industries’, and the hi-res graphic is in the comments. HCN: Epic Probed by the FTC: I joined the HCN guys to talk through the FTC’s investigation into Epic. Cedric’s new hairdo was an unexpected plot twist. The episode also covers MFN drug pricing, healthcare M&A and Eli Lilly’s acquisition streak. Fall Conferences: At eHealth Exchange’s Annual Meeting in Austin on Oct 27, I’ll moderate a panel on the tensions between AI, HIEs, and timely patient access with Jean Ross (Primary Record), Therasa Bell (Kno2), Byron Crowe (Doctronic), and Michael Marchant (Freenome). Here’s the rest of my schedule if you want to meet up: CommonWell (Redwood Shores, CA): Oct 13-14 Will be participating in a fun Jeopardy event Open@Epic (Madison, WI): Oct 20-23 Will be enjoying Verona, Willy Street, and other local adventures eHealth Exchange and Sequoia Project (Austin, TX): Oct 27-29 Yeehaw HLTH (Vegas): Nov 15-18 Groundhog Day, Venetian Edition RSNA (Chicago): Nov 30-Dec 2 See me at “Governing AI in Breast Imaging: What Health Systems Are Actually Doing” Digital Health Counsel 2026 AI Summit (Seattle): December 2-3 Will likely be speaking to a bunch of lawyers about information blocking Posts I Liked ChatGPT’s Epic integration: game changer or nothing burger?: Joshua Liu, MD offers five thoughts on OpenAI’s Epic launch, starting from the point that it rides the same open APIs available to anyone. He argues read-only access leaves ordering to Art and the ambient startups, and asks why HCA is piloting it alongside Commure. He’s sorta a must-follow at this point - consistently excellent, thought-provoking takes. Epic, Lilly, and the Discovery pass: Seth Chaney reads Epic’s first major Discovery deal (with Eli Lilly), as well as its revised developer terms on commercial displays, as the pipe finally opening between EHRs and pharma. Life sciences and health continue to collide. Scott Rossignol on EHR payer platforms and ePA fees: Scott argues the top ambulatory EHR vendors are turning the prior auth mandate into a per-member-per-year toll on payers, for an API whose operating cost has nothing to do with covered lives. His fix is two lines of regulatory text: put the CRD/DTR/PAS certification criteria in the Base EHR definition, and bring payer-facing ePA connectivity under § 170.404’s cost-based fee rules. It’s a good solution. Health API Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe