Daily MIC: NBA Scores Most Watched Finals Since 1998, NHL Stanley Cup Highest Since 2019; FOX Finds Programmatic Ad Identity in ROKU Combination; OpenAI Cash Burn Hits $3.7B in 1Q

Research evidence excerpt

Daily MIC: NBA Scores Most Watched Finals Since 1998, NHL Stanley Cup Highest Since 2019; FOX Finds Programmatic Ad Identity in ROKU Combination; OpenAI Cash Burn Hits $3.7B in 1Q

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the series on Sunday drew 5.9 million viewers, the most for a game six of the Stanley Cup

Final since 2019. The six-game series averaged 5.2 million viewers, also the highest since

2019 (which went to seven games). This year’s series was easily the most watched under

the NHL’s current media rights deal, in which ABC and TNT Sports alternate years airing

the Cup final. It more than doubled the 2.55 million viewer average on TNT Sports for the

2025 series and was up 26 percent from ABC’s last turn in 2024.

FOXA, ROKU: Future of TV Briefing: Fox finds its programmatic identify in Roku (Digiday) -

In acquiring Roku, Fox stands to shore up two of its biggest weaknesses in today’s TV – and

increasingly streaming – ad market: a dearth of first-party data and a fledgling programmatic

business. Fox technically already has an ad tech stack in place. Its acquisition of free, ad-

supported streaming TV service Tubi brought along with it the AdRise ad platform. That

platform included an ad server on which Fox has been unifying its streaming properties,

including its flagship Fox One, and that has served as the basis of the OneFOX ad platform

that the company unveiled a year ago. But Fox’s ad platform has been lacking in one crucial

area: first-party data. While Tubi has nearly 100 million monthly active users, people don’t

have to log into Tubi to use the service. “They have a large amount of first-party data through

their digital properties, like websites, but I don’t believe they have a large robust first-party

audience that could be scaled across multiple channels as efficiently for large enterprise