Why Elisabeth Murdoch's sister group wants its ideas to behave like brands. ByMaureen Kerr, Contributor. Maureen Kerr covers AI, media and entertainment economics. Sep 23, 2026, 08:06am EDT Sep 23, 2026, 10:22am EDT Summary. SISTER Group, co-founded by Elisabeth Murdoch, has taken a minority stake in Anthony Freedman's Common Interest to develop entertainment with brands involved from the outset. The partnership comes as broadcaster and streamer budgets tighten, producers face pressure on IP ownership and direct audience relationships become more valuable. SISTER and Common Interest want to develop ideas as brands from the beginning, choosing formats around audience, budget and commercial goals rather than starting with a television commission. The model is less about brands replacing streamers than about building audiences and IP earlier, with ownership agreed project by project. Sister Group (SISTER), the studio co-founded by Elisabeth Murdoch and Jane Featherstone, has taken a minority stake in Common Interest, the communications and entertainment group founded by Anthony Freedman. The investment underpins a partnership, announced on Wednesday, to develop entertainment with brands involved from the beginning. In a video interview with me, Freedman and SISTER Group CEO Lucinda Hicks described the deal as a response to a changing entertainment economy: tighter budgets from broadcasters and streamers, pressure on producers' ownership of IP and the growing value of building direct relationships with audiences. Neither company is saying how large the investment is. They are not disclosing how many projects are in development or what they cost, and no brand partners on the new slate have been named. Freedman is clear about what the stake is for. Partnerships are announced all the time, he says, and many are wafer thin, with little more substance than the headline of the press release. The equity is there to anchor this one. The capital goes toward Common Interest's branded entertainment work and its expansion in North America, and he says neither business has any intention of a merger. That makes this less a story about the size of a new financing model than about what SISTER wants the model to do. The group behind Black Doves and Chernobyl is looking for ways to build audiences and intellectual property without beginning every project with a broadcaster or streamer ordering it. In other words, brands are not simply replacing broadcasters and streamers as buyers. The experiment is whether entertainment IP can behave like a brand before anyone tries to turn it into a show. The breadth of the two groups gives them more ways to test that idea. SISTER spans film and TV, podcasts, publishing, live entertainment and digital-first production, while Common Interest's eight companies include Baby Teeth, which created and produced Finding Jamie, and Amplify, alongside brand strategy, cultural intelligence and communications businesses. Forbes Daily: Join over 1 million Forbes Daily subscribers and get our best stories, exclusive reporting and essential analysis of the day's news in your inbox every weekday. Freedman describes the combined capabilities as an embarrassment of riches: the partnership can choose the format around the audience, budget and commercial objective rather than deciding at the outset whether an idea is a television show, vertical series, podcast or live experience. What Jamie Oliver already owned. There is a useful contrast in Finding Jamie While He's Finding Himself, the vertical comedy created and produced by Common Interest's Baby Teeth for the Jamie Oliver Group in partnership with Life360, which I wrote about in August. Oliver, the British chef and television presenter, came to that arrangement with the valuable pieces already assembled. His business owned the underlying IP, operated its own channels and had an established audience. Life360 could finance entertainment around all of that without needing to own any of it. What it bought was access to attention Oliver had already accumulated. SISTER and Common Interest are proposing something earlier in the process. "We are trying to think about our content and our ideas as brands right from the beginning," says Hicks, describing a model that can begin with an audience or a community rather than with a script. The conventional economics of production explain the timing. The latest census from Pact, the U.K. producers' trade body, found that U.K. primary commissioning revenue fell 4.7% to about $2.2 billion (£1.65 billion) in 2025. Revenue from non-TV work, including feature films, events and advertising, has more than doubled since 2022. Hicks points to another pressure: producers giving up control of IP through their commercial relationships with the platforms, and with the streamers in particular. Brand money is one response, but retaining rights is not automatic. She and Freedman both say ownership will be agreed upfront, project by project. What has changed since 2010. Branded entertainment is hardly a new diversification strategy for production companies. In October 2010 FremantleMedia took a majority stake in @radical.media, the New York production company behind brand-backed series including Iconoclasts on the Sundance Channel, in a deal its parent Bertelsmann described as part of a plan to broaden and diversify the business through new business models and customer groups. What has changed is the surrounding economics. That deal came before streaming reshaped how television was financed and ordered, and before talent and production companies could routinely build distribution of their own through YouTube, TikTok and other direct channels. Today, controlling the relationship with an audience is itself an economic asset. Brands "really covet the audience attention that the entertainment industry has been able to curate," Freedman says. The opportunity, as he sees it, is to redirect some of the money spent renting attention through paid media into entertainment people choose to watch. That does not make every brand a commissioner. Freedman describes brand involvement as a continuum, from participation in a finished format through to funding a project from the start. Nor does it mean SISTER intends to make the next Black Doves with a logo attached. Hicks resists that reading as too narrow. The point of the combined portfolio is that the idea does not have to start as television at all. That is the real distinction. Jamie Oliver came to Finding Jamie with an audience, distribution channels and a brand already in place. SISTER and Common Interest are betting they can build those things around IP before a streamer, broadcaster or advertiser arrives to buy access to them. Less than $2/week.

Life360's $8 Pet Tag vs Pet GPS: what each one does. Life360 has launched a $7.99 Pet Tag that gives owners a cheaper alternative to its Pet GPS tracker, but the two products do very different jobs. The tag works only after someone finds a pet and scans its QR code, while Pet GPS can actively track an animal that has wandered away. Life360 announced the Pet Tag on August 25 alongside new pet-care routines and Zoomies alerts. The company says more than 8 million pets are now registered on Life360. Life360 Pet Tag vs Pet GPS at a glance. | Feature | Life360 Pet Tag | Life360 Pet GPS | | Upfront price | $7.99 one time | $49.99 hardware listing | | Subscription | None | Required for GPS features | | How it locates a pet | Finder scans QR code and can share location | GPS, LTE, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi | | Live location | No | Yes | | Escape alerts | No | Yes | | Battery | None | Up to 14 days claimed | | Finder can contact owner | Yes | Yes | | Best fit | Identification after a pet is found | Active tracking and escape alerts | The products can complement each other, but owners choosing only one should start with a simple question: do they need help finding the pet or mainly help getting it home once someone else finds it? The $7.99 Pet Tag works only after someone scans it. Life360's Pet Tag support page confirms that the tag is not a GPS or Bluetooth tracker and does not provide ongoing location updates. When a finder scans its QR code, the owner can receive an app notification, inbox message, and email containing information the finder chooses to share. The finder can also leave a note or share their location without installing Life360. Owners manage the contact details attached to the tag through the pet's Life360 profile. Life360 says the owner's phone number and email can be shared with the finder. That makes the Pet Tag fundamentally different from Bluetooth item trackers such as Google Pixel Tag and Apple's AirTag, which can use nearby devices to update an item's location without waiting for somebody to scan a code. If a pet is missing and nobody has found it yet, the Pet Tag cannot tell the owner where it is. Its advantage is simplicity: no charging, no subscription, and no electronic tracker hanging from the collar. Pet GPS adds live tracking and escape alerts. Life360 Pet GPS is designed for active tracking. It combines GPS, LTE, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi and can send an Escape Alert when a pet leaves a configured Place. Life360 rates the rechargeable battery for up to 14 days depending on use. Below 6%, the tracker can enter Bluetooth Reserve Mode, which the company says can keep it discoverable through nearby devices for up to six months. The tracker weighs 28 grams, or 33.7 grams with its mount, according to Life360's specifications. That makes it substantially bulkier than a passive tag. Pet GPS also connects to Life360's Pet Finder Network. A Lost Pet Alert can notify eligible Life360 members near the reported location, while Life360's support documentation says the owner's phone number is shared with recipients and the alert remains visible for up to 72 hours. There is a QR fallback too. A finder can remove the tracker from its collar mount and scan the "Scan Me If Found" code on the back to contact the owner without installing Life360. For comparison, Apple's $29 AirTag 2 uses the Find My network rather than cellular GPS. It costs less to maintain, but it does not offer the same live GPS tracking or geofence-based escape alerts. Pet GPS costs more than the tracker price. The $49.99 hardware price does not tell the whole story because Pet GPS requires a qualifying Life360 membership. Life360's newer materials advertise a $99 Pet GPS offer that includes one year of Silver for eligible new or returning members. A current Life360 support article says Silver renews at $99.99 per year unless canceled and can support up to two Pet GPS trackers in the paid Circle. Gold and Platinum memberships also support Pet GPS, although some older Life360 help pages still reflect the previous Gold-or-Platinum-only setup. Multi-pet households should also watch for activation costs. Life360's current documentation says each additional Pet GPS added to a Circle requires a one-time cellular activation fee, although it does not publish the current amount. At launch in October 2025, Life360 said the first device's activation fee was waived and additional trackers cost $79.99 to activate. Buyers adding more than one tracker should confirm the current fee at checkout. The Pet Tag collects less location data, but it is not data-free. Life360's privacy policy specifically describes security protections for Pet GPS, including encryption of location data at rest and in transit. Those hardware protections do not translate directly to the Pet Tag because the tag has no GPS radio, Bluetooth hardware, battery, or programmable electronics. The relevant data begins when somebody scans the QR code. Life360 says a finder can submit a note and location while the owner's contact information is used to reconnect them. The company's broader security materials say data sent between devices and Life360 systems and stored in its primary systems is encrypted. What its public Pet Tag documentation does not specify is a tag-specific retention period for scan records, finder-submitted locations, or messages. That is a narrower privacy question than the original draft suggested. The tag is not silently tracking a pet, but using the QR service can still create account, contact, and finder-submitted data inside Life360's systems. Which Life360 pet product should you buy? The $7.99 Pet Tag makes more sense for owners who mainly want an updatable ID tag. It has no battery or subscription and gives a finder a simple route back to the family. Pet GPS is better suited to pets that roam or escape frequently. It adds live location, geofences, escape alerts, and Life360's recovery network, but it requires more hardware on the collar and an ongoing membership. Using both provides two recovery paths: Pet GPS can help locate a missing animal, while the Pet Tag gives whoever finds it first a quick way to contact the owner. Similar recovery networks are becoming more common outside pet tracking too. Google's Find Hub can use nearby devices and temporary location sharing to help owners recover lost belongings. Also read: Some Android apps can pass precise location data to advertising SDKs once location permission has been granted, making data-flow disclosures another consideration for connected services.