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Welcome to The Brief by Kuro House, your daily dose of sharp insights and essential updates from the world of marketing and media. Today, we’re diving into some headline-grabbing legal battles in the AI space, a seismic shift in TV viewing habits, and more. Let’s get right to the stories that matter most for your day.
First up, from Adweek, Reddit has launched a major lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity and three data-scraping firms: Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and SerpApi. The core allegation is that these companies collected and resold Reddit posts without permission to train AI systems. According to the complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, the scrapers accessed Reddit data through Google search results, while Perplexity is accused of purchasing this scraped content from at least one of the vendors. Reddit claims the defendants masked their identities, hid their locations, and disguised their web scrapers to bypass security measures. The company says it caught Perplexity “red-handed” by using digital markers and even after issuing a cease-and-desist, Perplexity’s citations to Reddit increased forty-fold. Reddit’s legal team describes this as evidence of a growing “data laundering” economy, where AI firms seek high-quality human content to train their models and are willing to bypass legal agreements to get it. Notably, Reddit has licensed its data to OpenAI and Google but is pushing back hard against unauthorized use, following a similar lawsuit against Anthropic earlier this year. The scraping firms, for their part, deny wrongdoing and say they only provide access to publicly available information and require clients to use their services lawfully. As this legal battle heats up, it’s a stark reminder of the high stakes—and high demand—surrounding user-generated data in the AI arms race.
Switching gears to TV and streaming, Nielsen’s just-released Gauge Ratings for September 2025 highlight the powerful return of football season. According to Adweek, broadcast TV was the only segment to see month-to-month gains, driven largely by the NFL and college football. Sports accounted for a whopping 33% of broadcast’s total viewership in September, up from just 11% in August. In fact, 15 NFL telecasts across CBS, Fox, and NBC outperformed August’s top-rated show, with the biggest game more than doubling last month’s highest audience. Streaming remained the most popular format, accounting for 45.2% of TV usage, but actually dipped by 1.2% as viewers flocked to live sports on broadcast. The combined share for linear TV—broadcast and cable—rose to 44.6%. Broadcast saw its largest monthly increase ever, with a 20% jump in time spent watching. Cable, meanwhile, was flat overall but saw a 9% increase in cable news consumption. In the streaming world, YouTube led with 12.6% of viewing, followed by Netflix at 8.3%. Disney’s streaming bundle, Amazon Prime Video, Roku Channel, Tubi, Paramount+, Peacock, and Warner Bros. Discovery’s platforms all saw minor shifts, but none matched the broadcast surge. This data paints a clear picture: live sports remain a massive draw, capable of shifting the entire TV landscape, even in a streaming-dominated era.
That’s all for today’s Brief. The intersection of technology, content, and audience behavior is moving faster than ever, and we’re here to help you keep up. Whether it’s the legal battles shaping the future of AI or the ever-evolving world of media consumption, staying informed is your edge. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you tomorrow with more stories that keep you ahead of the curve.
