Ode To GeezerMedia
The most-viewed live event of all time was the 2008 Beijing Olymics Opening Ceremony. It pulled roughly 2 billion viewers worldwide, though to be fair, roughly half of that was in China alone. Live Aid in 1985 pulled 1.9 billion, and the FIFA World Cup routinely pulls about 1.5 billion for live telecasts. Note that none of these has any long-term historic value.
By contrast, the most viewed podcast episode of all time was the 2018 Rogan/Musk interview, which pulled in 69 million views over all platforms, including live and recorded streams. The Rogan/Trump interview has already taken second place with 45 million views in five days only on YouBoob. This doesn’t include Spotify or TwiX, for which I don’t yet have numbers.
In comparison, ABC/NBC/CBS nightly news programming pulls 18.9 million combined average views per night. The combined average daily viewership of the top four cable news networks is 2.5 million across all platforms, with FOX getting roughly half of it.
Since broadcast networks and scheduled programming were invented in the US, it makes sense that the US invented scheduled nightly news shows. Granted, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird made the first public broadcast of a television signal for the BBC in 1926, using mechanical-scan receivers; however, it was RCA’s Red and Blue networks, which eventually became NBC and ABC respectively, that pioneered scheduled TeeVee programming.
A little historical side note: I was in the London borough of Haringey, on 10 March 1980, watching the Alexandra Palace (Ally Pally) burn down. This was the birthplace of BBC television and a new mass medium.
The FCC filed an antitrust suit against RCA in the early 1940s, forcing RCA to sell off the Blue network (primarily news and cultural programming), which rebranded as the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). The Red network rebranded as the National Broadcasting
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
