Posted on 09/07/2023 2:10:43 PM PDT by jeannineinsd
In the summer of 2014, the cable and satellite bundle peaked. One hundred million households were subscribed to ESPN, the most successful channel in the history of cable, and the apex of the greatest business in the history of media had been reached.
But no one knew it.
Cable, satellite, and media executives were all blissfully unaware of what was coming. Fox Sports FS1 had launched the prior year — yours truly appeared on the very first show in the history of the network, a 2013 college football preview show. In the summer of 2014 the SEC Network would make its debut. The SEC Network was, in fact, the single most successful cable and satellite channel debut in the history of the cable industry. With the launch of the SEC Network, ESPN, the channel’s owner, stood at the pinnacle of its power, the company seemed indestructible, a gold plated money minting machine.
Billions of dollars in profits flowed off ESPN each year, enabling all of Disney to flourish. It was the crown jewel of the company, a profit spigot, the Titanic of the cable fleet.
But an iceberg loomed ahead.
And almost no one saw it coming.
The era of cable and satellite cord cutting began in the fall of 2014.
Quietly, at first.
So quietly, in fact, that most at ESPN and in the cable industry refused to acknowledge what was occurring. A few million here, a few million there, slowly a trickle turning into a stream and then the stream turning into a river and before long there was a flood of cord cutters.
(Excerpt) Read more at outkick.com ...
Yes, some will pay, but on cable and satellite everyone paid even for channels they didn’t watch. And the outrageous salaries that NBA players are getting is because ESPN pays outrageous amounts to carry their games. Are you willing to pay $40-$50 a month for ESPN year round? That’s what they will have to charge and that still won’t make up the loss in revenue from the cable companies.
I disagree, at least for the big college football conferences like the SEC and Big 10. I can see those conferences creating their own streaming services (think SEC Network without the ESPN logo) and SEC fans paying the SEC conference directly (with that money going to the schools).
I haven’t watched network TV in years, so yes, they are probably just catering to the audience that still watches “Free TV”.
That’s like a sign of the biblical end times.
I never go to the gym which reminds me that I need to pay a visit to Gold's and cancel my membership. 15 years of paying every month. I've only set foot in the building 3x for a total of under 60 minutes.
The only time I see "TV" is when I go to eat at Applebee's. A good reminder of what I'm not missing.
I record everything and watch no commercials (my stomach is not that strong). At least half of the sports programming I watch is with the volume completely off. The wokester announcers are insufferable. As long as they don’t bundle the AM radio feed into ESPN or something, those leftist broadcasters can all go to hell.
You know your college football program is in the dumps, when you get a woman announcer for your games.
I wonder if he could repeat himself a few more times and stretch that article out just a little longer.
“They may only be 13% of the population, but I’ll bet they’re at least 40% of the TV viewers in this country at any given time.”
Could be—don’t know for sure.
One of the lesser known facts about cable TV is that many of those subscribers live in HOAs or senior apartment complexes or other communities where they pay monthly fees to the housing complex owners/managers which include a reduced rate for cable TV.
Here is the kicker. Even if they “cut the cord” they still pay the fee.
One of the other lesser known facts about cable TV is that even if you cut the cord you are still subsidizing woke cable TV channels as long as you use the same company for Internet services.
Why? Because the Internet services are very profitable and are subsidizing the cable TV.
if your cable tv bill not counting internet or phone service is say 100$ a month, ESPN alone is about 15$ roughly, maybe more. They charge the most to cable companies as a carrier
A couple of years ago I mentioned to a family member that I can’t remember when I really watched ESPN, when it used to be a regular event. His response was, “you know, me neither, but I’d forgotten I did used to watch a lot”.
The programming became too much opinion, which then went woke, with less live sports.
The only reason I have cable, at this point because I don’t watch Fox News anymore, was for my Red Wings hockey...it’s the only way to get it (without doing an NHL.com subscription with a VPN to spoof my location, you can only get out-of-market games). At this point, it’s too expensive an option just for that.
Cable bundles should have died years ago. It’s a dinosaur of a business model.
“The math doesn’t add up.”
None of the math adds up—not in programming channels, not in cable TV, not in streaming—it is all funny money pay more for less and less viewers.
Imho Charter aka Spectrum has the huge upper hand over Disney—because they have a real business that really makes money—providing Internet service.
Disney is all smoke and mirrors at this point.
If I was Charter I would be a ferocious negotiator and bring Disney to their knees.
“You know your college football program is in the dumps, when you get a woman announcer for your games.”
And ESPN calls her “a legend.”
The regional sports networks are the canary in the coal mine for the cable bundle. I used to work for Fox Sports Pittsburgh and I can tell you, the pain is real.
Not only are cords being cut but cable companies do not pay the same rate as one another. It’s like a UAW contract, you pick a company, freeze it and isolate it.
We could pick up county by county viewership and extort (I purposely use that word extort.) more from certain cable companies than another. The further you got away from your major league city, the less you paid. The closer you were, the more you paid. Advertising was a joke, it was gravy, stellar ratings basically paid for production and a bloated staff’s salary. The fortune was made in the bundle.
We were on 24/7/365 and had ratings 70 times or 210 hours during the winter (Pittsburgh Penguins.) and 150 times or 450 hours during the summer (Pittsburgh Pirates). So of the 8,760 hours in a year, people watched our channel 360 of them. We could actually sell time in only 4% of our broadcast day that advertisers would buy.
However people in PA, WV, OH and MD paid us $7 a month. In turn the Pittsburgh Pirates, the worst team in baseball, had one of the best local TV packages valued at $50-60 million.
The cable cutting killed the RSN’s. Most of them, believe it or not, have small to no ratings. No value whatsoever. When they started losing 30% of their base revenues cable companies could say no to any price increase, they couldn’t bundle 10 networks with it.
I would say I feel bad for my old industry and co-workers but I don’t. The TV business is absolutely filled with executives and managers that are the dumbest people you will ever meet that all believe they are smarter than any person in the room. No lie, no exaggeration, no bias. I lived it for more than 10 years.
His doom and gloom about sports costing a fortune for fans in the future is not going to happen.
There are just as many dumb people at Google, Amazon, Apple and Netflix that think the “halo effect” of having a sports league is worth the billions they paid for it. That will get the sports fans through the next 10-15 years.
It’s a debt that is coming and will have to be paid but there are even bigger pockets being controlled by the same old dumb TV people.
Of course. Everybody knows colleges and universities wouldn’t think of engaging in woke anti-American activities like the NFL and NBA does.
Yes, and even worse, the "channels" (networks) pay a carriage fee to the cable companies. So the cable companies get paid from both the content consumer and the content seller. The entire economics of cable tv is baffling to me. And Congress gave them Monopolies, basically, since they cannot compete outside of their designated market (an oligopoly). This made some sense back in the 1990s when there were 1000 different cable companies and they had to shell out big bucks for infrastructure builds. But they have had more than enough time to recoup those costs. And to complicate things even more, they have largely consolidated into a handful of conglomerates some of whom are massively in debt buying out various markets.
Congress needs to do with cable what they did with Ma Bell. Open it up. Make the cable and fiber a public utility so that anyone can offer services. There was a time, some will remember, when DSL was the "best way" to get internet and there were dozens of companies offering it because they were free to use the copper lines. Not so now with the cable and fiber.
None of this would change the price of what the streamers charge; which if you have fiber or cable and a couple of subscriptions ends up costing about as much as cable. But at least with streamers you pick and choose what to watch and can drop them whenever you want to stop paying.
Good post.
The industry is in complete chaos—that is the dirty secret of all the players.
It looks like the divisions will be called the SEC and B1G, at least in the near future.
There will be a special conference for rap music lovers on the west coast tho. It will be call 2Pac. 😂
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