Local news still has an audience. The question is are local TV stations reaching viewers where they’re watching.
In the latest episode of In the Vicinity, Tim Hanlon talks with Ring Digital Founder Brian Ring about new research from his Future of TV Live report and what it reveals about how audiences consume local news. Their conversation explores the opportunities and challenges for stations looking beyond traditional TV.
Listen to the full In the Vicinity podcast above or get it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Tim Hanlon: How's it going? You are In the Vicinity. My name is Tim Hanlon. I am the founder and the CEO of the Vertere Group here in Chicago, where we consultatively advise and consult with various companies in the media and technology spaces, and I welcome you to the proceedings this week. It's our little weekly sojourn into all things local media.
That's what we do around here. And our guest this week is the inimitable Brian Ring. He, the founder and chief cook and bottle washer of Ring Digital. That's ringdigital.tv, where he advises and consults, he says, for lots of different companies and stuff. And we're here to talk about his latest quarterly issue of his fine and very intriguing research project called Future of TV Live.
That can be found at futureoftv.live. And a lot of stuff in this fall's version, And by the way, you can get the report for free there on either of those two websites, ringdigital.tv or futureoftv.live. We talk about the current and future of local television news, the good, the bad, and the threateningly challenging in our conversation.
I think you're gonna find this very intriguing. I highly encourage you to check the research out either before listening to this conversation or after it. But either way, listen to it. You will certainly enjoy and learn a bit as I did. Here's my chat with Brian coming at you now. Please, as always, enjoy.
Been enamored with your research and the conversations that we've had over the years, and you had me on your show a couple of quarters ago, which I appreciated but I really dug what you were throwing out there this quarter with your current report, especially in and around the various aspects of local media consumption and those kinds of things.
So I wanted to dig into that. I thought our audience would enjoy that particular vibe. But before we go any further, how about describing yourself, your background, and the firm, and what you guys focus on and how you got into this crazy business known as media?
Brian Ring: I'm super passionate about it. I got into it after I purchased a DirectTV TV in 2019, and that really changed TV for me. I hated TV before that, and after that, I was like, "Wow, there's so many great things to watch." Yes, I'm skipping the ads, I'm skipping around or whatever, and I've been endlessly pursuing this idea that TV's got a bunch of great stuff, and we constantly need to bring forth better user experiences that get people to the content they want, the clips they want, the browsing experiences they want, all of it.
And I don't know, starting maybe 10 years ago, I noticed that we could do online surveys and I'm in such a narrow part of it. Pople may or may not know the term FAST, or streaming in general. I serve a lot of big companies in a lot of different spaces, but I think what is a little bit interesting is there's just a lack of data.
From my perspective. That's just what I think. I know there's a lot of expensive data that a lot of media companies buy that can illuminate what they need to illuminate. I also have found that, I don't wanna throw any shade, but a lot of these studies that are sponsored by a company have a little bias.
So anyways, I discovered early on that I could conduct these surveys at a super razor-thin low cost, and actually answer just the questions that I wanted to answer. So last spring, I did one on verticalization in sports. So this fall, it was all about news, mobile news consumption habits. And then in conjunction with that mobile news habit, I also really wanted to take a deep dive into the local media market. Like you say, I've been watching all this for a long time. How many people do watch a local newscast from the CTV app that Mr. Station Group spent millions and millions of dollars on?
If I can find little tea leaves, little data points that can help people make better investments in their TV experiences, these media companies, the publishers, that's what I do. So this is just one little nugget. I should even back up. So Ring Digital, I'm all about growth for my vendors, my company, my clients that are basically technical firms.
So they're B2B, that's a B2B motion, and this survey is my B2B2C nod. It's like, "Hey, if we can know what's happening in TV better than even the media companies that gives us a leg up to go in and say, 'Listen, you need to buy this or do that or build this solution.'" And so that's a little bit about Ring Digital and the origin of the report.
Tim Hanlon: Yeah, and your quarterly report's called Future of TV Live, or .live. ... And I believe it's free to those who sign in and subscribe, if you will, yeah?
Brian Ring: Yeah, exactly. I appreciate that. And I will say, so futureoftv.live, and I'm gonna say something, I'm gonna take it a little bit deeper.
I've always been a very tactical guy, and now I'm completely an agentic engineer. And so not only will you get my research at futureoftv.live for free, you will have a way to review top news stories and engage in interactivity around what was the top news story of the year. I have a set of artifacts where I take my raw data from these surveys, and I allow Claude to build an interactive artifact, and you can go in and actually see some of this data live.
And then I do this Future of TV Live quarterly Zoom cast, which also is in this special resource library. You can go in and search different things agentically and pull out clips, and it's all kinds of good stuff like that. So yeah, that's basically my blog and a blog plus.
I built Ring Digital. Future of TV Live is my blog plus. It's a blog plus a resource library, reach research, email subscription, et cetera, et cetera. So that's what I've been trying to do for too long.
Tim Hanlon: With the current data that I wanna dive into that came out of your current report that just came out a couple of weeks back, I don't know if you wanted it to be focused so what I sussed out so detailed on local news and local television presentation of news, but that's one of the things that I derived out of this that I wanted to kinda go deeper with you.
You mention… How can I best describe it? Local news I don't think necessarily comes out bad per se in this. We certainly have been exposed to plenty of negativity and how things are collapsing and getting more challenging, all that kind of stuff. But you actually throw out the data that shows that there's a significant amount of TV viewers out there, people that, in the realms that you survey, say that they watch local news, not only in the previous week, but fairly regularly, and that it's not irrelevant.
It's still a thing. But you wanna explain some of that?
Brian Ring: Yeah. I appreciate your frame-up. The thing is full of contradictions. So on this page I'm looking at right now, slide 11, I actually do a survey of all kinds of news sources. The question is, "Which of the following news channels or apps have you watched in the past week on any screen?"
Very wide funnel. The great news for local news is that it was at the top, local news station broadcasts. Still super important, and there's lots of other data that supports that. The second kind of fun thing is I was expecting CNN to be way up there. ABC News Live, now that's a really popular FAST channel, they're doing really well, whether that's branding, people don't understand what they're watching, or ABC News Live, they're just doing a killer job. So that's the second interesting kinda tidbit out of that particular one, which I think is good news. However I think just to jump a little bit I have this slide, the next slide, page 12.
It's like, what's the plan B moat for local? In other words, I ask the question: think about the last time you watched a local TV station newscast. In your areas, ABC, CBS, NBC or a Fox station, or an independent local station. I'm just trying to be very broad. Think about the last time you watched local news.
How did you watch it, period? That's it. Number one, which I guess you would expect, and I think everybody knows this, they're completely reliant on the pay TV ecosystem. 35% live on a pay TV service. Sure, nothing wrong with that. 35%'s wrong with it. It used to be 85 or whatever I would've gotten, right? So that is a huge decrease, but there it is.
Number two, social media or YouTube, in which we all know that's super hot. I think a lot of local news folks or news stations in general think it doesn't give us any ownership. It's a wholesale business. You're stuck in wholesale, which always is something that people are struggling with. And then the second one, in a free streaming app, 13%.
And that, I just wanna say, is another highlight of this report writ large, is that when we talk about live channels, It's really important to remind people, because people don't know what FAST is. They don't know what it is, what you think it is, what I think it is. Let me just say it in the clearest way that I thought the report said, if you ask someone, let's call it six, seven years ago, maybe five, but for sure 10, whatever, "Hey, have you seen that latest channel?"
"Oh yes, I've seen it." Okay, the two of you are on a linear legacy pay TV ecosystem, period, end of story. You're either OTA, you're cable, you retrans something. There is a huge class of channels now that are just free. It's Tubi, it's Local Now, it's all these things. And I don't think a lot of people appreciate how that has really flipped.
And so in that case, the question then becomes... I'm sorry, I'm being a little long-winded, but page 12 again, it's like, okay, what's your plan B? Meaning, is your plan B direct-to-consumer? Is that what you're gonna do? Because on that exact same page, only 7% watch your local newscast in your local TV app.
And by the way, having been in this business for 30 years there's nothing harder to do in the world. I'm talking against my book. I understand you need to capture data. You need to contract with me and my team and all whatever to create the most frictionless funnel into an app and get people to play or whatever, but you just stand back and look at Brian Ring as a wise guy trying to take care of his money and where should I invest it.
Boy, that's a really tough slog. So that slide is like, "What's your plan B?" If you're not gonna do a direct channel, your plan B is social and free and FAST. And there are a lot of companies ambivalent about FAST, right? What's your plan B?
Tim Hanlon: Yeah. So let's talk about that. So in essence, I think what you're describing are two polls on a continuum, right? You've got the television, the traditional television distribution model. Which OTA, certainly cable, are bundled and whatnot. Which local television has essentially grown up with and/or figured out, at least in the near term, how to maximize with things like retrans and the like, right? And the carriage of such.
On the other end, you're talking about, okay people are watching things through mobile or through streaming and the FAST channels and stuff. Oftentimes outside of those bundled ecosystems. Through maybe new ecosystems, like an operating system on their TV set or a Roku or whatever it might be.
And the initial flex is we don't want to necessarily give that away per se, so we'll create our own distinct streaming app, and people will subscribe to that because that's supposedly how strong our brand is in a local market. But the reality is that big fat in between, right?
And that's the world of streaming channels, however they're available. That can be inclusive of a direct subscription app and whatever, or a direct app that's downloaded. But the reality is that a lot of people are experiencing, quote-unquote, television now in a much more free form, everything available.
I don't know if it's a TV channel or if it's a streaming FAST channel or if it's a combo of both. And by the way, some TV companies are specifically hedging or fudging on that, like ION. It's a live linear free channel. It's also a cable channel. It's also an over-the-air diginet channel.
And Scripps loves it that way because it doesn't matter for them, which is great. So those distinctions don't matter as much. I guess my point though here is that what think you're saying is that a local television station shouldn't just be at those two poles, through the traditional ecosystem of pay TV or just their own app. They gotta come up and be very comfortable with being distributed and available in other places for free that aren't necessarily in their direct control.
Brian Ring: Yeah, I think that's right. I just wanna interject. I think it's super important. It has to do with one other storyline, I would say, which is, and it has to do a little bit with the CEO of Scripps [Adam Symson] mentioned this, and it has to do with this idea that, yeah, but there's TikTok and Instagram and Shorts.
The vertical Shorts, and not just the vertical Shorts and the form factor and the ergonomics and all of that, but literally, and I'm gonna rephrase what the Scripps CEO said in what I saw on screen from Kaitlan Collins, which is to say she started messaging basically "Hey, come to my social feeds," and "This news hour I give you it's just a wrap-up. Come watch me all day," right? So while I was designing this, all these news organizations are leaning so heavily into vertical with the sort of concomitant pushback of what? Really? I'm also designing this, I'm looking at TikTok, I'm looking at Bloomberg, I'm looking at The Wall Street Journal, their video. And I'm starting to realize, I know it's a silly thing because everyone's talking about vertical in every domain, but I think what's interesting is what I tried to bring out in this report, now I'm talking about vertical for hard news.
That's what I'm talking about. And I'm talking about really informative takedowns, for example, of what happened this quarter with the agents breaking out and the hugging face or whatever, and specifically seeing, wait, this person on TV doesn't know what they're talking about.
This person on TikTok just really explained the whole thing really well. Nailed it. So big picture, that was another really big element of my study here, and to go through the vertical and everything else. And basically to say, you know what? I think especially for the local businesses they've been slammed three times over.
I'm like, "Dude, dude, wake up. We need these things, the paddles." You're gonna need the Narcan, the whole thing. And as they're coming out, I was like, "Dude, TikTok verts, please." Don't let this happen and where YouTube and TikTok natively are going horizontal and vertical.
And I'll be honest, I'll just tell you a really funny story about it. I'm talking a little bit about my book, which is to say you need dual streaming infrastructure, bro. And not only that, I need to be using GPUs, or I can't reformat your horizontal well for the vertical.
So I say that a little tongue in cheek, but it's not me. It's YouTube, it's TikTok, it's the behavior. It's people holding their phone like this. So I am trying to make this a little bit of a wake-up call to news organizations. This is the way you need to get people into the idea that you even have content worth their time.
Tim Hanlon: I think that's one of the biggest ahas I saw. So the notion here that the station isn't unimportant, it still has relevance. Certainly older audiences tend to be wedded to the traditional dynamic of how those are delivered and stuff. And arguably, as those people age out that gets compromised.
But the platform is different. So the platform of a cable operator or an over-the-air antenna and that kind of stuff, right? To the extent that the older audience is still comfortable with that classic distribution mechanism, fine. But that's not the growth area. You're suggesting quite otherwise.
And then I would argue in not so many words, youth kind of drives this, and there's platforms that serve those younger cohorts, plural. They are definitely very different in terms of how they present stuff. And I'll throw this at you, and you tell me what you think. I think it's very hard for local television, the local television business model, to aggressively reformat, reorient, reconstruct, redistribute content that they are at least wedded to financially to deliver in a linear traditional format other than maybe repurposing a broadcast. This idea of atomizing content from a broadcast into maybe a TikTok stream.
Where it's like it's a story over here, a report over there, a this or that. Where it's a stream of stuff. I think it's very difficult because it's not the television station business model and the local television news production process is not set up to be that atomized.
Brian Ring: Yeah, 100%. I’ve been building media asset management systems for 15 years. I am very close to the idea of automating content workflows. It's basically been my whole career. And as we've gone along, we've been able to add more sophistication and automation, all these great workflows, and then cloud, and then agentic AI. It's agentic software code.
For me, a little bit of the passion comes in, okay, now I'm reading the market a little bit. I've been in the business. I see these vendors, customer relations. And then I see in my own life, whether it's me, writing a research report, my website, all these different tools.
I've been selling software, multi-millions of dollars of software. Six, seven figures of software my whole career. That's what I've been doing, and I'm just blown away by the ability for agentic software to remove friction. All of which is to say, yes, it's a complete mess, but I see such a light at the end of the tunnel. And unfortunately for me, and everyone in the vendor business, we all see the same light. And I do think that you're gonna find a group of people that are gonna grow up. And by the way, I would love to engage with any station group that wants to do this. I will literally go live at their local station.
I am convinced that between being able to recite what you're filming while you're filming it, being able to get different perspectives and different people from the community to come in and be on TV, different ways of engaging with the local student body. I have two kids that just graduated from high school and are now in college.
I had one engagement where one of my sons had won an award, and then he was on local news, and they gave me a clip. So I had everything. And I think that they need to double down and work really hard because I don't think this is easy.
But yeah why you guys aren't seeing this get into the studio. We'll show you how to do vertical, and have people really understand it, how you don't embarrass yourself, or how what this is about, and how it's about communications and not anything else. I, like so many people I've met in this business, have been watching all this local news stuff and been like, "How can I help? Can I do something to help?”
If there's a story that's interesting, one and a half minutes is just not enough. That might get you into the start of the story. I do see the local news business in general just trying different things, being in experimentation mode, et cetera.
So I don't wanna be negative. I'm very hopeful and optimistic. This agentic software revolution is the time to transform the newsrooms on the front line and create all the content that is needed.
Tim Hanlon: So let's put it this way. I think everybody would nod vigorously at that, and probably a lot of broadcasters would take a little umbrage and say “yeah, we're moving as fast as we can."
From my perspective, that's not fast enough, and maybe I think that I could echo that from what you just said as well. I'll take a license to do that. But the notion, though, is I think what this data shows in your report is that the format matters, and the format for younger audiences is absolutely not now, nor ever likely to be the traditional pay television package of linear newscast kind of delivery and more mobile-centric, more vertically oriented. It’s just better formatted for the way people get their information and the way they consume content.
So I guess the real challenge, though, I think if you're a local TV station or group or owner of a group of stations, is how do we shift our business model fast enough. Or maybe not too fast to accommodate that? We know how to make money in the linear fashion, right? And by the way, every two years, the political coffers open up for us and it just ensures that we're not gonna move any faster than we have to because they continue to fill our coffers every two years buying linear TV ads. But when and how do we make that gearshift to be more vertical first or mobile first or other distribution points first?
I've said this for years, it just feels like this quote-unquote "digital thing," big bucket big misnomer bucket, is still nibbling around the edges and is still a sideshow to the linear television project.
Brian Ring: Yeah. I don't know if I can dispute that, to be honest. And on top of it, I'll just make another comment that the sheer competition on the national front is also crazy. Even if you wanted to say, "Hey, we have this local and national thing," which they're all doing and should do, great idea. Even that is a super crowded space. I think the only thing that I see, and I guess this is also an answer that everyone would know, but, and this is a really hard answer, is so I've always been a huge believer in talent. And so I really do think they're gonna have to double down on people that aren't just TikTokers and aren't just gonna sit on the news desk, and they're gonna have to pay those people a little bit more, because they're gonna be agentically coding solutions, this, that, and the other.
But if I envision that kind of person in the future, I think they've got enough time in the day to do those things. Yeah. There's really smart people in the community that can have perspectives on whatever it is. You do this, you do that. Your agent's helping you along the way to filter out this, transcribe this, and you get back to the studio and maybe whatever.
You have some division of duties. Maybe you have one guy that's the talent guy, one guy the tech guy, or whatever, so it's not just one multimedia journalist, but rather two tag teamers or whatever. I don't know what it is, but my sense is just from the capacity that I've been given, for example, to do these charts you're seeing here. It's just that the 10X of productivity is massive, so it's pretty obvious. I hate to say it like that, but it's pretty obvious.
Tim Hanlon: To you, it's obvious, right? But the problem is when you've grown up and you spent decades in a distribution environment that is hardened and proven, so to speak, right?
And is being somewhat challenged from the outside. What you're describing is something of a more open architecture. Which is you're creating something, a viable news story that could still be part of a local newscast, which is great. That's the good news.
The bad news is it now has to be, in not so many words as you described, has to be effectively coded so that it can now go out into the open architecture of everything from TikTok to this to that, to whatever those things are. Or AI search environments that are literally looking for those pieces of information as might be needed to be delivered somewhere else in a completely nonlinear and maybe not even controllable kind of manner yet is exceedingly important because if that thing is gonna be seen in all that diaspora, it better be ready for shipment, so to speak, so that people can find it, discover it, and God forbid, click through to go deeper. Which is when, and I would argue, that the local, whatever the producer of such would be able to then go to town on.
Brian Ring: Exactly, and then you're letting somebody talented go to town on a topic of whatever, an AI or whatever. Dude, you're gonna be on TV, you're gonna be on TikTok. Are you some kind of ML expert? No, but I do my work. Okay, great. There's the career, right? That's a rewarding career path.
I wanna say one more quick thing, a little bit of a nod to another thing in this report, but I wanna give credit, by the way, to a lot of the news organizations. I have here live now from Fox, it doesn't score high, but they're doing cool stuff there. So I wanna make sure, CNN, I mentioned to you the stuff that they were telling Kaitlan Collins.
Second thing I'll say really quickly on CNN is, and you've been in this same game, oh, interactive TV, isn't that a good idea? Finally, in July of this year, I think it was June or maybe July, CNN for their two late night hosts, both Abby Phillip and Laura Coates did ask viewers to join the debate.
Ask Laura. I've always talked about how CNN does an amazing job. [Michael] Smerconish does an amazing job with a poll every day. But this is late night, big prime time. They're new, they're big money makers, and I thought that was amazing and bold. So I do think we might be in an era of a lot of bold, big bets, and let's move fast.
I think people see that this is super important. So I don't wanna lose the fact that they are working pretty hard. And when you do that interactivity, by the way, that helps your programmatic advertising effort.
Tim Hanlon: What I hear in this report and in what you've just described is that the local news franchise, if you will, isn't necessarily dying, but it is certainly not being helped by the fact that a lot of what it's delivered by is not necessarily being seen by an increasing number of people. That whole aging thing. Those audiences. That's kind of a strategic challenge, and maybe an even emergency in some respects, so that you now have to figure out, okay, the good news is that we've got quality news production and skills in doing that.
We've got decades of history of doing so. The bad news is it may not be seen in the one or two places that it's been normally or linearly delivered. So we in a wholesale manner distribute it. You talk about the agentic. Maybe the app is part of that, but maybe it's not, it shouldn't be the end all and be all.
But what I think I hear mostly in this report and from what you're saying here is that the idea of, say, vertical or mobile production in the workflow may be the hints of where this all needs to evolve to, and maybe being unbiased and such because the revenue will come. You'll figure that out.
And frankly, it's the only way local news or one's distinctive approach to local news is gonna be seen because they gotta be discovered. And that discovery ain't gonna happen if it's just more of the vertical-only environment that younger audiences may not even be familiar with, let alone come to see.
Brian Ring: The weirdest thing, I'll just cap it off with this. One of the things that I find the biggest win here is we could solve multiple problems at once. Because I see all the time, like TV News Check does a great job of, how difficult the newsroom is, journalists having a difficult time, everything getting cut.
So I mentioned how talent is so important for all of this. To me, what's so interesting is that we're at a moment in time where you could probably attract more of this younger audience by giving them the idea that they're gonna be on the new platforms as well as the old one. "Don't worry, you'll be on TV. Don't worry about it," right? "Just focus on your TikTok." And so I see that as a huge unlock and a huge enabler. And then, yeah, not to be too repetitive about it, but especially in the software business, what I would say to CEOs at station groups is "We've been in the software business where you can have one of the two. You have fast or accurate." No, not in agentic. You need to build it all. So there's no excuse to not be on every platform. And like you say, maybe that's the kick in the butt of "Dude, we have to be," so call in a vertical dude, or call in a journalist that's willing to spend another 10 minutes deep-diving and doing a whiteboard in the office or whatever.
The New York Times, all the big budget places are showing how this is done. As Rick Klein on the Powerhouse Politics podcast. The lessons are all out there right now on how to do all this, and I think it's just a matter of they've gotta have the will to do it.
Tim Hanlon: So last question. Do you see local news perhaps being augmented by entities that are not local television stations? Or do you see local television stations evolving quick enough or is there a meeting in the middle?
Brian Ring: I have to say I'm actually not optimistic for other scenarios. I don't see any other way than the one I've described. I thought about this a lot, do I care about who's running. If there's an election right now. I'm not looking at who's running for Burlingame City Council.
What if there's again something like on TikTok. And I saw somebody really good locally or whatever that was laying out the laws, how I do it, I'd be there, I'd be there all day, how to do it, whatever. So yeah, I don't think that unless they address the content shifts. I don’t know what it is. I think there's sort of a weird kind of disconnect here that we've talked about this whole thing. Older people really love local news, and younger people just really don't. But it’s hard for me to imagine that younger people couldn't be made to be super interested in, "Hey that hospital just went up, they're looking for this.” Or “Oh my God, Google didn't get that permit. What's going on? Are they moving?"
I just refuse to believe that there's not actually local news that people would wanna care about or whatever. But yeah. I don't really have a lot of insight but I'd love to explore it further.
Tim Hanlon: Yeah, I totally agree. Local news when done right and done persistently is absolutely important, and I think frankly younger audiences would agree with that too, and frankly find that information from whatever sources, right? Which is an issue. Through the various distribution means that they're comfortable with. I guess what I would say, and I think I hear you say too, is that, quote-unquote, local television stations haven't warmly or more aggressively embraced those, put this in quotes too, alternate distribution environments. Maybe they're not alternate anymore. Maybe they're more mainstream, and that's the problem/issue/opportunity.
Brian Ring: Huge. Yeah, as you're talking, I'm thinking of other things again. I just had two kids through school. They did the theater. We do the sports. We do everything. Nothing, no engagement. You guys could help me sell sponsorships, fill up seats, raise donations for the town.
You got the newspaper on the corner. The ability for them to come in and do the big news, big picture news and just ask the dude from this town and this town I think it seems like it's really a lost, a missed opportunity. So let's, again, let's be positive.
I think that's what you're gonna see. I think one or two of these station groups is gonna be swashbuckling enough, and they're gonna be like, "Get somebody on the case. Run a transformation. Bring this guy Brian Ring to agentically code up our editing systems, and ma- make this the vanguard place to work," right? Make this a cool, hot, hip. And I realize even the big buildings and everything else, so everything has to be touched a little bit, but what a great way to energize a group of people to be at a local station and show how we're gonna interface with the national effort and do our local thing, get out in the community.
And so I'd love to save local news. I'm ready to play the game. But no, I don't see very many opportunities otherwise.
Tim Hanlon: All right, our thanks to Brian. No holds barred, and we wouldn't have it any other way. The report is issued quarterly and can be yours just for the asking for free at Brian's website for said report. It's called Future of TV Live, and the website is futureoftv, all one word, .live. futureoftv.live.
You can also find more about Brian's consultative work at his corporate site. That's Ring Digital and that can be found at ringdigital.tv. Ring Digital, all one word, .tv. Either way, enjoy, and you will learn a lot, as I did. Our thanks, of course, to the folks at TVREV who put all of their energy and resources behind this weekly escapade.
Mel Hourigan, Jason Damata, Jessika Walsten, and Mike Gasbara, thank you kindly. Our thanks, of course, to the good folks at Madhive who also financially and otherwise support this effort, and our friend Jerry Payne for his audio excellence, of course, who we could not do this show without either.
Thank you, of course, for listening, and we'll see you next week here In the Vicinity.
