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Sports has to feed into a streamer's 'ecoystem': Kevin Mayer

The 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is bringing together the world's best and brightest executives from the realm of creative marketing and advertising. Candle Media Co-Founder and Co-CEO Kevin Mayer sits down with Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi by the Cannes waterfront to talk about where linear TV and sports streaming fits into the broadening streaming landscape, as more platforms like Amazon Prime (AMZN) adopt ad-supported subscription tiers. "One of the reasons paid TV is in such [a] secular and substantial decline is the cost of those sports rights. And everyone had to bear the cost of those sports rights. So you had every consumer, almost every household had paid TV 10 years ago, and everyone was paying not only for the entertainment that they loved, but also for sports," Mayer explains. "And not everyone watched the sports. And I think that helped drive the decline down. People were paying for something in a very expensive thing that they didn't really want to watch.  "So I think Netflix (NFLX) will put their toe in the water, but they've become a very successful entertainment company without sports. They have sports-related programming, but not the actual sports rights." Mayer finds that these major streaming companies need to incorporate these new sports partnerships in order to "feed their ecosystem in some way." Mayer's resume also includes his tenure as the CEO of TikTok, COO of the popular app's parent company ByteDance, and the chairman of Disney's Direct-to-Consumer & International segment. Mayer comments on the potential ban of TikTok within the United States and the acquisition sage surrounding Paramount Global (PARA, PARAA). Catch up on Yahoo Finance's full coverage of this year's Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.