Entertainment
AI Channel Mischief Time Cracks YouTube’s Global Top 15
A Japan-based channel with no players, no footage, and no FIFA deal finished the World Cup ranked 13th on YouTube worldwide. What its synthetic Haaland and Mbappe signal for every human sports creator chasing the same feed.
The most-watched week of the 2026 World Cup ended with a soccer channel in YouTube’s global top 15 that owns no broadcast rights, films no matches, and does not employ a single real player. Its stars are synthetic. Mischief Time, a Japan-based channel that generates deepfake-style parodies of Erling Haaland, Kylian Mbappe, and Lamine Yamal, finished the tournament ranked 13th worldwide.
The channel pulled 583 million views in the week of July 13 to 19, 2026, according to Tubefilter, whose Global Top 50 chart draws its data from the analytics firm GospelStats. Three weeks earlier, Mischief Time had entered the same chart at 30th with 405.4 million views. It climbed 17 places during the final stretch of the World Cup, past dozens of human sports creators, without a frame of licensed footage.
That climb is the story for anyone who makes a living on the platform. Mischief Time did not compete for the audience that watches real goals. It built a parallel one, and it did so at a scale that now sits alongside the biggest human channels on YouTube.
Mischief Time — official YouTube channel (@Mtime4)
The channel produces short-form parodies in which an AI Lamine Yamal pulls pranks on an AI Mbappe and an AI Haaland. Its about page describes the work as transformative parody built by blending 3D CGI, AI synthesis, and film editing, and it labels the output synthetic media. The pipeline mixes Blender, a ComfyUI-based synthesis workflow, Adobe Premiere Pro, and After Effects. No player, league, or federation is paid.
Tubefilter’s Sam Gutelle read the same numbers as a warning. His recap named three lessons from the tournament’s YouTube performance. The first was blunt: “there’s no replacement for broadcast rights.” The channels that ran up the biggest totals held real footage.
The Rights Holders Still Won the Week
Brazil’s CazeTV led the entire chart with 1.1 billion views, built on an official FIFA broadcast deal, and its lifetime viewership passed 12 billion at the tournament’s close. FIFA’s own channel finished fifth with 682 million views, lifted in part by a video featuring iShowSpeed. Licensed footage remains the surest path to a billion views in a week.
The catch is what came next. Gutelle’s final takeaway was that human creators cannot hold the line against AI production forever. He pointed to Mischief Time as the evidence.
“Human creators can’t stave off AI forever,” he wrote, and after noting the channel’s six-month growth, added that “AI-generated representations of famous soccer players may be the way of the future.”
What a No-Rights Channel Signals for Everyone Else
The competitive threat is not that Mischief Time beat the broadcasters. It did not. The threat is that it beat the humans working the same short-form territory without rights, the creators who pivoted to soccer content hoping the World Cup would carry them.
Tubefilter counted 39 of the week’s top 50 channels as primarily Shorts operations. That is the arena where Mischief Time competes, and where synthetic production costs almost nothing to scale. A human creator chasing the same feed spends on cameras, travel, and time. An AI channel spends on compute.
For platforms and rights holders, the channel poses a slower question about the players themselves. Haaland, Mbappe, and Lamine Yamal generate the views here, yet none of them consented to the likeness, and none collects. YouTube helped its soccer creators reach real athletes earlier this year. The AI facsimiles proved just as popular with Shorts viewers anyway.
The disclosure label is doing quiet work in that gap. Mischief Time tags its videos as synthetic media, the posture that keeps parody on the right side of platform policy for now.
The channel was created in June 2022 and now counts roughly 8.44 million subscribers against nearly 13 billion all-time views. Most of that came in the last six months, the window Gutelle called the key datapoint. The World Cup is over. The synthetic players are still uploading.
Entertainment
Eli Rallo Signs With iHeart for ‘Prose Society’ Podcast
The NYT bestselling creator turned 1.5 million book-obsessed followers into an iHeartPodcasts deal. ‘Prose Society’ premieres August 12, and its structure is a blueprint for literary creators chasing audio money.
Eli Rallo built a book club out of a TikTok following that never asked for one. The 1.5 million people who watch her review novels and litigate internet discourse across TikTok and Instagram now have a standing appointment on Wednesdays.
Rallo, the New York Times bestselling author, has signed with iHeartPodcasts to host Prose Society, a weekly literary-meets-pop-culture show premiering Wednesday, August 12. TheWrap first reported the deal on August 5. The show is a co-production distributed by iHeartPodcasts.
Here is the part that matters for anyone tracking where creator money moves next. Rallo did not pitch a network from the outside. She arrived with a community already built, funded, and reading on schedule. A niche literary creator converting an engaged social audience into a major audio partnership is the template book-content creators have been circling for years.
The format is deliberately small before it is big. On the show’s iHeart listing, each month listeners pick one featured book together, then spend the weeks that follow on the ideas, characters, and culture around it. New episodes land every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are heard.
The premiere brings a working writer to the table. Rallo’s first confirmed guest is author Amy Chozick, discussing her novel With Friends Like You. It is a book conversation with a book person, not a celebrity drop-in, which is the whole point.
The Community Came First
Rallo has done a version of this before, at a smaller scale and behind a paywall. In January 2025 she launched Prose Hoes, a Patreon-hosted literary salon and book club for serious readers who wanted the reading without the stuffiness. Prose Society, the community, grows out of that. The podcast is the front door to it.
That stacking is the story. Social following, then a paid subscription community, then a network podcast deal. Each layer feeds the next, and each one is owned or co-owned by the creator rather than rented from a middleman.
Her credibility as a book person is not borrowed. Rallo’s second essay collection, Does Anyone Else Feel This Way?, published in October 2025 and became an instant New York Times bestseller. In December, Forbes named her to its 2026 30 Under 30 list and called her a Gen Z Carrie Bradshaw. She earned a master’s in journalism from Columbia in 2021.
A Return She Planned For
This is not Rallo’s first microphone. She hosted a lifestyle and culture podcast, Miss Congeniality with Eli Rallo, before stepping away in July 2024 to concentrate on writing. She left with a plan to come back on her own terms.
“I started a podcast after getting my masters in journalism in 2022, and when I stopped that podcast, I told myself that I’d come back to podcasting one day when the time and partner felt right, and I could really deliver the best possible content to my audience,” she said in a statement to TheWrap. “Three years later, ‘Prose Society’ really feels like the perfect fresh start.”
iHeartPodcasts brings distribution reach that a Patreon feed cannot. What Rallo brings is an audience that already treats her reading list as an event. That is the trade every network is now chasing, and book creators have quietly become one of the most reliable places to find it.
The first episode posts Wednesday. The featured book of the month decides the rest.
Entertainment
ExtraEmily Lands Solo Series on Hulu and Disney+
ExtraEmily’s Twitch streams just landed on Hulu and Disney+ as a 15-episode pocket.watch series, a live test of whether parasocial bonds survive a paywall.
ExtraEmily, the IRL Twitch streamer known off-platform as Emily Zhang, built her audience on the loose, unscripted rhythm of a live channel. On Saturday that channel got a rewrite. Fifteen of her past adventures now sit on Hulu, cut to length, cleared for teens, and slotted beside reality staples on a premium service.
The show is called ExtraEmily: Creator Essentials, a 15-episode solo season produced by pocket.watch, with every episode available August 1 on Hulu and the Hulu hub on Disney+. Zhang counts more than 950,000 Twitch followers, an audience that lived entirely inside a live window until this weekend.
Here is why the launch matters beyond one streamer’s resume. pocket.watch did not pull a polished, edit-ready YouTube act for one of its featured solo launches. It chose an IRL live streamer, whose value is the unscripted feel that a 22-minute VOD episode strips away. That choice is a test of whether the parasocial bond built in a live chat survives the trip behind a subscription paywall.
Zhang treated the whole thing with a shrug on stream the night before it went up. Speaking during her July 31 broadcast, she said, “I’m actually so curious how they’re gonna edit it but, basically, I was like ‘Yeah of course you can put my streams on Hulu. I think that would be fun.'”
She also named the scoreboard she is watching. “So if they do well on Hulu then that’s really good. And they will let me know if they end up doing well,” Zhang said. The episodes lean on collaborations, with titles built around cooking challenges, a skateboarding lesson, and food dares alongside fellow creators.
The Season Is a Repackaging Job, Not a New Shoot
None of this was filmed for television. The episodes assemble existing vlogs and streams, edited into a tidier episodic shape for a family audience. That is the pocket.watch model, and it is cheaper than an original production because the footage already exists.
The solo season is one arm of a much larger push. It arrives around the premiere of Rabbit Hole, a 10-episode variety series that landed on Disney+ and Hulu in July and gathered 36 creators with a combined 675 million followers, ExtraEmily among them. Zhang is one of three cast members, alongside Collins Key and Sofie Dossi, launching individual series timed to that premiere, while eight other Rabbit Hole creators already have shows streaming on Hulu.
Stacked together, the pocket.watch universe runs 240 half-hour episodes.
Disney Is Selling Access, Not Just a Show
The framing from the platform side is telling. Rabbit Hole was co-created by pocket.watch Chief Content Officer Albie Hecht and Head of Development Carin Davis, with CEO Chris M. Williams as executive producer. Williams described the plan as building “a true entertainment universe around the next generation of creator-driven stars.”
Disney’s language points the same direction. Lauren Tempest, the company’s Head of Content Planning and Partnerships for direct-to-consumer, said, “Rabbit Hole gives our subscribers access to 36 of the most followed creators for teens, all in one series.” That is a subscriber-acquisition pitch, aimed at the young viewers Disney+ and Hulu need to keep.
For Zhang, the trade is different but real. She keeps the Twitch channel that made her, and she gains a shelf on two of the largest streaming services in the country, reaching viewers who may never open a live stream. For pocket.watch, she is a data point in an experiment about whether live-platform audiences convert to premium VOD.
Zhang set her own benchmark plainly on stream: the platforms will tell her if the show performs. The next 14 episodes will answer her.
Entertainment
Phil Rosenthal Bridges Netflix Exit With a YouTube Episode
Before Somebody Feed Phil leaves Netflix for a full YouTube run in 2027, Phil Rosenthal dropped a mini-episode to keep his audience warm through the gap. Inside a rare premium show walking the platform migration in the opposite direction.
Phil Rosenthal spent eight seasons flying to Bangkok, Lisbon, and Rio to find the best bite in the room. This week he stayed home, in a 40-seat diner in Larchmont Village named for his late parents.
On July 27, Rosenthal premiered a special Somebody Feed Phil mini-episode, an inside look at Max and Helen’s, on his Phil Rosenthal World YouTube channel. It was the first original content on the channel tied to the show’s coming platform move, and Rosenthal himself watched along with fans as it went live at noon Pacific.
The timing is the point. Somebody Feed Phil left Netflix after Season 8, and the next full season does not arrive until early 2027. This mini-episode fills the gap. It keeps a traditional-TV audience engaged on the platform where the show plans to live, months before Season 9 gives them a reason to subscribe.
That gap-filler is the creator-economy tell. A premium unscripted host is treating a standalone free episode as a warm-up act for a whole audience migration, the kind of retention move built for a channel, not a network. Other traditional-media names watching this transition may borrow the playbook.
A Show Walking the Migration in Reverse
Variety reported the underlying move in March: new episodes of Somebody Feed Phil shift to YouTube in 2027 under a strategic global deal between Rosenthal’s Lucky Bastards banner and Banijay Americas and Banijay Rights. Prior seasons stay on Netflix.
The direction of travel is what makes it unusual. Deadline called it the rare premium series, unscripted or otherwise, to go the opposite way, noting Netflix has historically pulled shows up from YouTube rather than sending them down to it. Rosenthal is running that pipeline backward.
His reasons trace to the sitcom that made him. “One of the things I always loved about Everybody Loves Raymond was that it was free to watch everywhere,” Rosenthal said at the March announcement. YouTube gives him that reach, plus direct control of the channel and the audience.
This is not his first switch. The series began as I’ll Have What Phil’s Having on PBS in 2015. When the public broadcaster could not fund a second season, Netflix took it over and retitled it Somebody Feed Phil, where it ran eight seasons from 2018 to 2025.
Why the Diner Is the Right Bridge
Max and Helen’s opened in November 2025 with chef Nancy Silverton, named for the parents whose kitchen-table humor anchored the early seasons of the show. It earned raves and long lines for its comfort food.
The choice of subject is deliberate. Rosenthal is not sending fans a trailer; he is sending them a place they can visit, tied to the family story that built the series in the first place.
His pitch for the diner is as plain as his pitch for the channel. “Our mission is simple. We want to elevate comfort food,” he told Variety.
Season 9 lands on the Phil Rosenthal World channel in early 2027. Until then, the diner episode is the only new Somebody Feed Phil most fans will get, and it is sitting on the exact channel Rosenthal needs them to find first.
