The Airbnb of Anything
The company that disrupted the vacation rental industry is reinventing itself. This time, it has its eyes set on, well, anything and everything.
Dear Readers,
I just returned from the Digital Age Tech Summit 2025 in Istanbul, where I gave a keynote about my upcoming book Press Play and what effective strategies for companies are to enter the video gaming space. In a crowd of roughly 250 people (not a bad showing given the fact that as the last talk of the conference I was standing between them and dinner), nearly every phone went up to take a picture of the following slide.
Traditional broadcast TV is pretty much dead - which brings us to this week’s newsflash.
ESPN cuts the cord
After Comcast and Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), who is about to make the long-awaited spin-off of its traditional cable TV assets official, sports powerhouse ESPN is the latest player to all but pull the plug on its cable TV business. Owned by Disney, ESPN is moving its offering into a full-fledged streaming service. Unlike the already existing ESPN+, which only gives you the ability to live stream certain live events, the new ESPN streaming app covers the entire content offering the company has to offer - including everything that until now was only accessible with a cable TV bundle.
The fact that the company was set on naming its new service “Flagship”, but has now decided to just simply stick to ESPN is a clear sign that it expects the streaming service to, and is very much ok with, cannibalize the TV business and ultimately shut the lights off.
The price point of $30/month might seem high when compared to the $17.99/month for Netflix (no ads) and especially the $7.99/month ad-supported plan. But: comparing it to other dedicated sports streamers, it’s actually highly competitive.
ESPN will be the first attempt of a TV channel making the leap to streamer. Time will tell if it will succeed, but it has the brand and (for now) the rights to premium sporting events and leagues. But if Amazon and Netflix keep chipping away the rights stronghold, the question will be what ESPN’s unique value to sports fans will be.
MAX is rebranding to - you guessed it - HBO MAX
We’re not done talking about WBD just yet. The company yesterday announced that it will rebrand, for the umpteenth time, its streaming service. It will cease to be called MAX and will be rebranded to HBO MAX.
Common sense prevails after all!
Having personally refused to ever call the service MAX, I feel vindicated by this decision. Removing HBO, arguably one of if not the strongest brand in all of entertainment, was the original crime the WBD executives committed. In light of the announcement, there are rumours and stories circling how the push for MAX was apparently an internal power trip by just one executive, who pushed it through despite overwhelming evidence against the decision. This coupled with the fact that WBD CEO David Zaslav continues to get paid roughly $50 million per year despite the company’s stock price having deteriorated since it started trading in April 2022 tells you all you need to know about why Professor Scott Galloway dubbed it the “worst board of directors in media.”
Perplexity gets into commerce
GenAI startup Perplexity announced its partnership with PayPal that sees Perplexity double down on AI-empowered commerce in a move to differentiate itself from its competitors OpenAI and Anthropic. Perplexity users now can make purchases directly in their respective chat and book travel, buy concert tickets, and pretty much any other product you can think of with simply one click. Payments are facilitated via PayPal or Venmo, and PayPal will handle all the backend logistics (processing, shipping, tracking, invoicing).
To quote Ryan Foutty, Perplexity’s vice president of business. “Perplexity wants to be wherever users are asking questions and making decisions. Our vision for assistive AI is that everything just gets better and easier for people — wherever they are and however they prefer to make decisions.”
Those decisions absolutely include commerce for products and services and there’s a lot of money to be made here. Global sales influenced by AI grew to $229 billion between November and December 2024 - a $20 billion increase compared to 12 months prior.
Experiences, services, entertainment, and commerce are among the many things that are on Brian Chesky’s mind. The CEO of Airbnb has bold ambitions.
“We’ve kind of, mostly, nailed vacation rentals. But we can do more.”
On to this week’s story.
The Airbnb of Anything
The company that upended the hotel and vacation rental industry is set on reinventing itself. This week, Airbnb launched Airbnb Services. Chesky and his team are looking at their company much more like a platform than an app with a singular focus. Now, users can book services across 10 different verticals, think make-up artists, private concerts, guided tours, directly via the Airbnb app. It kicks off this new endeavor with Chefs, giving users the ability to book a private chef directly to their location.
In recent years, Airbnb had already experimented going down this path when it launched Airbnb experiences for a selection of cities. This, however, is different in scope and ambition. Chesky essentially wants to build the Airbnb of anything - an all-encompassing platform for services and experiences. The Chef services are already available in 260 cities globally. And there’s a very important aspect to where users can order these services: you don’t have to stay at an Airbnb in order to access them. You can order them straight to your home where you live as well. This is arguably the biggest signal that the company wants to grow beyond the vacation rental industry.
Some analysts made comparisons in the aftermath of the announcement, stating that Airbnb is attempting to build the “super app”. I think that this is misleading. Whereas the concept of the “super app” is really geared towards everyday life tasks with frequent repeat usage - payments, booking transportation, texting, scheduling, food, deliveries, social - Airbnb seems to focus on a specific aspect of our lives: anything that is experiential in nature.
To me, the idea of a personal concierge feels closer to what Chesky’s vision is. With the recent developments in the realm of AI Agents, this becomes possible: a personalized companion that is attuned to your needs and desires, can book and organize these experiences for you - and ultimately even recommend things that you would like. When you’re on the road, it’s like having your personal travel assistant in your pocket, available 24/7.
The company that once bet on being able to convince people to let strangers stay in their homes is arguably making its biggest bet yet. Knowing that the founders in the early days at one point sold cereal boxes to make their dream of Airbnb a reality, I wouldn’t bet against them.
Walmart and Target are both releasing their Q1 earnings in a span of a week. It will be the tale of two massive retailers heading into opposite directions. On the back of the delay of its much anticipated title GTA VI, gaming powerhouse Take-Two will also report later today. Subscribe and please share your love for Technically Entertaining with a friend or colleague.