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The Coming Crisis in Media
The large corporate media complex is in trouble. With the shutdown in production caused by the Covid-1984 crisis, scripted TV series will be delayed starting their fall schedules. Sports networks have gone without any new content since March. Without new programing, viewers have little reason to tune in – even though, right now, they have more time than ever before to be entertained. Without viewers, advertisers are reluctant to pay up. Even worse for advertisers, could their products become associated with suddenly ‘problematic’ entertainment like a Police Procedural Drama. (Will shows like the “The Rookie” or “Bosch” be back?) In short the diversified media conglomerates like Disney, Warner Brothers have found all of their media streams drying up at once.
ESPN subscriptions where in decline long before the current compounding crisis struck:
It’s not difficult to imagine this has caused something of a revenue problem at ESPN, who have paid billions in rights for NFL, NBA, and MLB games. Only to find viewers have lost enthusiasm for many of these games, ESPN may have wildly over paid-for content. This could all be spelling big trouble for ESPN’s parent Disney Corp.
Disney Could Be Facing More Than a Lost Summer
For much of the American postwar period, Disney has been an entertainment refuge – a place to which people have retreated for a safe sanctuary of reliable entertainment. After the Vietnam War, veterans came to its parks to reassure themselves that life was worth living again.
That has intensified in Hollywood’s current era of franchises and name brands. Nearly every major moment on the American entertainment calendar is defined by a Disney product – from the Pixar release in the fall to the winter break trip to Disneyland, from the major Marvel movie in the spring to ESPN’s evenings of “Sunday Night Baseball” in the summer.
The absences this year will be jarring for American consumers, who will suddenly feel a large part of their entertainment summer gone after enduring a similar emptiness this spring. Josh Spiegel, a writer and frequent chronicler of Disney, likened it in an interview to “a limb being cut off, or an entire food group being removed.”
All of this could spell disaster for shareholders of these corporations. But could it be good news on the media reform front? Could the Democrat media establishment, which has long been making entertainment directed at a few square blocks in Manhattan, and LA county, finally be forced to make entertainment for the rest of us? Could these corporate media giants be on the verge of break up? With new management, will come new producers with new ideas. Maybe they’ll learn to keep their political peanut butter, out of our entertaining chocolate. Call me a Pollyanna.
Published in Economics
Do they still know how?
I’m through with sports! My new motto: “Not one second; not one cent.”
They will not get one second of my precious time; they will not get one penny of my hard-earned money.
Yes. The beauty of it, they dont have to know how. The replacement management will bring in new producers, new on-air talent. They’ll figure it out far better than the current management who doesnt see a problem.
Nah. They execs are more focused on pleasing their friends and fellow drones than in making money. Entertainment for the rest of us will have to come from the rest of us after the media establishment crash.
It’s an opportunity for “new media” — online, non-traditional content. New forms of entertainment on YouTube and Twitch are benefiting. Video game revenues, player counts, and viewer counts are up.
Sadly, new media are as plagued by the Left’s cultural corruption and intolerance as old media. But in some ways it is much easier with new media for conservatives to establish a brand.
The main challenge is bypassing the tentacles of Google and other leftist companies that can suddenly disrupt a party’s ad revenue or ban one from the platform. Conservatives need financial independence from leftist publishers.
In the meantime, consider Bishop Barron’s Word On Fire organization. It all started with regular lectures on YouTube.
That’s a fair point. The capabilities of consumer grade cameras and editing software that could be purchased at a local electronics store have never been closer to the professional grade equipment that studios use. The biggest thing that separates them now, is the talent and training of the user. I see no reason why a drama club from nowhere couldn’t begin to produce an original drama and put it up on YouTube, maybe just for kicks at first…
ESPN has already pivoted to esports. Hundreds of millions of people watch esports today. It’s a billion-dollar industry even without dedicated TV programming and cross-generational support. Esports players earn tournament rewards and career contracts comparable to real sport players. Philadelphia is building an esports arena next to its football stadium.
It’s a growing industry. The lockdowns have quickened that growth. Unfortunately, it is still dominated by leftist organizers, so the politics in real sports is echoed in esports.
I have never watched or played in a video game tournament. But I do occasionally play a game that hosts esport tournaments. Rocket League is basically 3-vs-3 indoor soccer with rocket cars.
Saw a lot of that sort of stuff when I was in Palestine, TX. (Not quite the edge of the world, but you could see it from Palestine if you stood on tiptoes.) There were s lot of amateur theatrics and several times I got ringed in to write a stage play. That is what we should be doing.
Hollywood director Joss Whedon created a 3-part mini-series for YouTube and company with 15-minute episodes during a writer’s strike years ago. It sold like hotcakes. Whedon personally made more profit from Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog than he did from The Avengers.
The show starred Felicia Day, writer and lead actress in The Guild. That web show succeeded as a more amateurish venture.
A distant cousin of mine did something similar.
Hey, you’re late to the boycott. Mine started hours after my birth in 1950. Of course it helped that my genome entirely lacked an athletic talent gene, and consequently, the athletic interest gene never developed.
But welcome at long last to my party.
Watch for the networks to develop and promote news shows featuring social justice warriors fighting corrupt cops . . .
You mean a Reality Show? A Journalism reality show would be interesting. Like a bunch of Journalists living together in a big house, and trying to out-scoop one another by creating the biggest controversy.
Thinking “Shades of Blue” was ahead of its time. It was a police procedure drama – but the cops are corrupt. They take pay offs from drug dealers. The drug dealers are then obligated not to deal to children or close to schools so that the crime stats for their precinct look good. The drama ensues when one of them is entrapped by the FBI and is forced to wear a wire.
A few years ago, I ended up in bed for two weeks with pneumonia and thought it was a good time to binge watch a show I’d heard was great: The Shield. It was fantastic, but also about corrupt cops and very dark. I watched the whole thing in a couple of weeks and I was dreaming about it by the end. It was intense — loved the show, but too much to cram into my psyche in such a short time.
I’ve also heard great things, but I havent seen it either… I think its on Amazon prime, now.
A chart with a baseline that begins at 70 million, is hardly accurate. If you showed the whole thing, it wouldn’t look nearly as bad.
As shown there, the decline appears to be over 50%. But it’s actually more like 20% or less.
its less than 20%. Its still the loss of 16 million subscribers over 7 years, its not a good trajectory for the company to be on.
Not a good trajectory, no. But starting with a baseline of 70 million makes it look much worse than it is.
Ok fair point.
Its just a chart I lifted from a investment website.
But it’s still law enforcement (FBI) against law enforcement (corrupt cops). I think the show should be a woke group of individua;ls with the PC mix of race, sex, sexual orientation, and chemical/physical mutilation (trans) fighting police . . .
LOL this reminded me to cancel my cable. It’s been on my to do list for weeks. Since sports ended, we don’t turn the TV on anymore.
Someone wants to talk the economics of sports television?!?! (Oh, God… here comes EJ… again…)
At their peak, ESPN and ESPN 2 were in 101M households. And yes, they’ve taken a hit. But live sports still attract more linear viewers and command more eyeballs than anything else.
The question will be post-Covid and post-genuflecting to a neo-Marxist political movement, whether or not the viewership rebounds or heads south. So far, NASCAR ratings are up 8% but they have most days to themselves with little competition. It is possible to have all the major sports plus colleges operating in September. We’ll find out which sport is healthy and which ones are not.
My wife has the TV (both TVs) on all the time but the only thing she watches is “The Price is Right.” I do watch Discovery ID at night when we go to bed and we call it “The Murder Channel.” It’s almost the only TV I watch. I sometimes watch college football but it may be badly altered this fall. I like to watch golf, then only professional sport I watch on TV.
Plus I suspect with the Democrats stating that there will be CARES Acts 2 through 6, that the Mainstream Media will simply become the recipient of massive Federal Bailout funding. Any noticed loss of viewership will be blamed on COVID.
Perhaps it is appropriate that Big Media receive government funding. Big Media is currently so very protective of our real government, which is why throughout the long impeachment charade, 90% of the talking points were for the Russian Collusion angle.
The Media is currently more effective than PRAVDA ever was. After all, in the Soviet Union, intelligent people knew PRAVDA was all lies. Here some 30% of the people still believe Brian Williams, Rachel Maddow, Cooper and Lemon. So we have an arm of the government agencies, especially the FDA and CDC, that parrots the talking points of the PTB behind the agencies more than PRAVDA would have ever even thought of doing.
In the words of one Douglas MacArthur: “I Have Returned.”
And I’ve done so to say that both the original poster and the SF Chronicle story that was linked are…missing some things. While the article did touch upon Disney+, it only did so in the context of the Hamilton musical. It didn’t mention that Disney+ already has 54.5 million subscribers as of May 5, which means it’s well on its way to profitability.
Neither the article nor the original poster mention anything about Hulu, which is 2/3 owned by Disney. Hulu has something along the lines of 32.1 million subs as of March 28, with 3.2 million of those subscribed to the Hulu Live TV streaming service. Which, in effect, makes Disney a cable TV provider. Around the 8th biggest in the nation, which is pretty good after being around as a live-TV streaming platform for less than a year.
So, for those of you who think this will humble the likes of Disney into “making entertainment for the rest of us,” may want to think about that again.
The Super Bowl attracts around 100 million viewers. It involves a century-old sport. It overlaps with basketball and hockey seasons, but they don’t compete on that day. It competes with non-sport television.
The League of Legends video game championship final match in 2019 attracted 44 million concurrent viewers. The general championship attracted 100 million viewers. The game is only a decade old. It had to compete with daily streaming of many other games.
I’m not arguing that they are equal in any way. But the popularity and profitability of esports is growing quicker than you might think.
With increasing frequency, game publishers take viewership into account. They design games for decade-long play spans, cinematic visuals, and audience participation.
How many old history buffs might enjoy watching commanders direct virtual armies against each other night after night? How many action junkies would enjoy watching battles of virtual fighters without possibility of real injuries (no helmets, no stops for penalties, etc)? There’s a wealth of potential for esports to supplement real sport viewing.
That’s the ideal. Hopefully, real sport leagues can be saved from politicization and over-regulation. There are viewers enough for both sports and esports.
I don’t doubt Disney+ will make money, but right now I’m guessing the subscriber base is a little inflated. We got a year free with our Verizon plan. We’ll probably renew, because we have a kid at home, but a lot of those Verizon “subscribers” won’t.
I haven’t watched other people play video games other than loitering around the arcade after I had run out of quarters. And even then, eventually I would drift away to hit on the cute girls in the food court.
Having said what I just said earlier, there is one type of existential crisis linear television is facing, one they’re not seeing while gorging on political division as a means to get ratings.
While Disney+ has 54.5 million subs, and Netflix has nearly 70 million subs, those numbers don’t tell us WHAT is being watched at any given time. I will submit to you that one of the principal ways that this nation will back away from the hyperpartisanship we’ve “enjoyed” is by determining how many people are watching which shows on the likes of Disney+ and Netflix, along with how many are watching live programming on Hulu Live, YouTubeTV, or Sling TV.
Once it is established that total viewership, along with viewership of each individual show on Disney+, Netflix, et al, is GREATER than the total viewership and per-show viewership of all of linear TV (broadcast, cable, satellite), THAT’s when…things will change. Especially when we as a nation come to realize that neither FOX News, MSNBC, or CNN have any real claim on the loyalty of the viewer based upon TV ratings.
Ha ha. Me too. I watch one hour every night before I read a book to get sleepy. My husband just likes to make sure there are no knives or poison handy and sometimes he hides my gun.