How do you consume most of your news and technology insights? Through B2B tech websites like SDxCentral? Or podcasts or vodcasts, whatever the difference is? Well, according to OpenAI, it's probably the latter, with the ChatGPT giant taking a leaf from the Cisco playbook to snap up Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN) for apparently a figure in the low hundreds of millions. And I'm cool with that; I'm aware a hot podcast is worth more than a well-regarded website these days, and OpenAI wants some cultural cachet to clean up its public image.

You may ask why I mentioned Cisco. Well, commentators have drawn comparisons with headline grabbers like Bezos buying The Washington Post and Google snapping up YouTube. The same folks argue the TBPN deal is more unusual as it centers around a show, not a media platform or news title. But dial your clocks back a little, to a time when AI was a mere spark in the coder's mind, hybrid work meant dialing into a meeting over speakerphone, and TV was the source of everyone's news.

Holograms and chit chat with Switchzilla

Back in 2010, networking stalwart Cisco played a part in The Rachel Maddow Show, a news program dedicated to all things U.S. politics that still runs to this day on MS Now – you know, the channel which Microsoft and NBC formed together three decades ago as MSNBC. As hosted by the eponymous Maddow, the show debuted in 2008 before getting a Cisco glow up two years later. While Cisco didn't buy the program, it did sponsor it and provide its low-latency, high-definition video conferencing technology TelePresence for remote interviews, in a significant broadcast debut for the Cisco Systems offering.

At the time, then VP and GM of TelePresence Charles Stucki lauded the Maddow tie-up as making for more "dynamic interviews" than those where guests would talk rather statically 'around' the latency from normal broadcast feeds, with TelePresence instead allowing more room to engage with and even interrupt the host and other guests.

Nowadays, you would call this a Zoom call, and it's pretty interesting to look back at how deep Cisco was turning to video in the late 2000s, early 2010s. YouTube was somewhat popular, if nothing compared to what it is now, Netflix was still flogging DVDs, and Skype for Business had yet to exist. Despite this, then-CEO John Chambers argued that video would become the dominant form of internet traffic and a central pillar of Cisco’s pivot to video collaboration. Gosh, they even released hologram technology that was surprisingly slick for 2011 – a good decade before all that metaverse nonsense took off.

The Rachel Maddow Show exemplified this new approach for the company, rebranding Cisco as more of an enabler of human interaction than an enabler of packets. The technology would also be used on sports broadcasts for ESPN, which is interesting when you consider TBPN is presented as an ESPN-esque sports-style take on technology news.

Another OpenAI parallel is that Sam Altman and company are arguably in a pivot just like Cisco was in 2010, turning from nonprofit to… whatever it is exactly turning into. TBPN gives it a chance to shape the often negative narrative about its product – generative AI – in an inversion of Cisco using political, business-adjacent narratives to demonstrate its chat-centric product on MSNBC. And bearing in mind how toxic political chatter is nowadays, OpenAI has inverted things again by avoiding political echo chambers, opting for tech bro talk that sticks to technology and how wonderful AI may or may not be. On that note, I should add TBPN will apparently retain its editorial independence (The Washington Post may have once said something similar).

Anyhow, as we’re on the topic of TBPN’s content, I feel obliged to mention that the show doesn’t talk about networking much. It has had the occasional guest like Meter’s CEO on there, which is apt considering Altman is a major investor in the network disruptor.

But I guess my final point is: if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest in network news and analysis, don’t rely on flashy vodcasts for your fix. Thank you for sticking with SDxCentral!