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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
Ratings don’t (directly) matter for non-advertising supported programming. As long as you’re paying the monthly charge, Netflix/Disneyplus, etc don’t really care of you watch or not. The viewership individual programming on their services only matters to the extent that it keeps you paying the monthly charge instead of cancelling.
South Park did a great bit on that, where the kids were concerned about how much time their parents were spending on the murder channels, so they enabled controls on the cable box, where the only way to unlock access to the channels was to answer questions about how to do specific tasks in minecraft.
At some point, viewership data does come into play even for Netflix and Disney+. One can only pump out so much original content, and waste so much money, without knowing what works for the customer.
I was in the same boat for more than a year. I finally canned the TV portion of my cable, and mailed back the cable box in March. The cable company then billed me for the box and has been after me to pay for it ever since. If you have to send back equipment make sure to send it back with a tracking number so that you can prove it was received – and you may want to consider spending a few bucks and getting insurance on the package as well. Especially if you dont have the original packing the equipment came in.
In addition to how many people will not be able to “cancel cable” because that’s how they get internet, including home wifi for their phones, laptops, tablets…
That’s the Streaming TV Service 101 class taught by Rob Long.
The ability to show prove of delivery/receipt can be a life-saver. I sent some form to Social Security once, Certified with Return Receipt, and after claiming they didn’t receive it “in a timely manner,” I was going to be cut off and have to go through appeals processes etc, all over again. But I had the receipt, with the mail room (or whatever) manager’s initials/signature on it. So I wound up just making a copy of the copy I had kept, and sent that in.
It’s especially bad with any “government entity” since they all seem to have some version of a “model administrative code” that they follow. One “rule” of that is that if you send them something, and even if they send you a letter saying they received it etc, if they later can’t FIND what you sent them, legally it’s the same as if you never sent it at all.
Meanwhile, if they mail YOU something, even without return receipt etc, legally you received it 3 to 5 days later, Even if you didn’t. Even if you gave them change of address notifications and they acknowledged it, but nobody ever put it in the computer or whatever. If they mail you something to the address they have on file, no matter how wrong they might KNOW IT IS, legally they sent it, and you received it. Period.
It’s such BS.
I’m pretty sure Rob will also agree that, at some point in the business, ratings and viewership data will matter to the streaming services, as it does with cable channels. Consider this: FOX News is, arguably, the only news organization that can generate 10% or more in profit margin from its day-to-day operations, including news gathering, before it has to collect a single dollar of advertising. This is due to the magic known as the cable subscriber fee, of which the network collects around 1.25 billion dollars. When you consider how much FOX News’s advertising base has eroded, that’s a crucial amount of change that is under serious threat should it be known that (name your popular show here) on Netflix or Disney+ gets higher ratings than Tucker Carlson’s show.
Maybe. But people don’t watch Netflix or Disney+ for the same reasons as Fox News. The bigger problem for tiny-niche channels, which Fox News isn’t (at least not yet), is breaking up the cable service offering “bundles” and doing more “a la carte.” Subscribers may be unwilling to pay even a fraction of a dollar per month for channels they have absolutely no interest in, such as HGTV, if they have the choice to go channel by channel.
The services are usually separable. All I get is internet, but I have a cell phone with the same company.
Especially in many smaller markets, it seems, the monopoly cable company can require you to have both TV and internet, or you don’t get either. Sometimes they also offer home phone service, but that kind of service has more regulation on both state and federal levels so they probably can’t require you to pay for that too, even if you don’t want it/won’t use it.
I’ve never been a sports fan of any kind, and I used to secretly envy the enthusiasm and apparent joy people felt when watching sports events. But now, I’m glad I’m not faced with abandoning all that (which I surely would, as I have abandoned Hollywood movies and TV). In fact, not being a sports fan made the decision to drop cable a few years ago very easy, as live sports is the primary driver for keeping the cable subscription for many.
That has not been my experience. I live in a major city, (Calgary, major in Canada) using a National cable company (Shaw) and while they do offer all the services – and will give temporary price breaks for bundling multiple services. They do now face competition from the Electric Company and the Phone Company who both offer gigabit fiber optics into the home, with digital cable offerings as well as phone service…
The major bottle neck in getting consumers more choice is the last mile – the cities control the right aways to the curb. If you could by pass that with wireless like OneWeb or Starlink propose – or with a 5G service. Cable and internet fees will drop.