I'm still waiting for the whole Sports Industrial Complex to collapse when people are no longer willing to pay through the nose for it. Any day now...
here we go again, DirecTv/AT&T about to enter yet another local channel dispute, this time, with CBS
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I'm still waiting for the whole Sports Industrial Complex to collapse when people are no longer willing to pay through the nose for it. Any day now...
I agree, you'd think that the Network would WANT to get thier channel shown to the most people possible and be HAPPY to be part of a company thats willing to have thier content.
Not so ....
If the NFL should leave CBS and say go to NBC, do you think that CBS will then lower thier prices ?
NO ...
ESPN uses this excuse to drive up prices, they claim to have all of these rights fees to pay for. But I guarantee if they lost all of those rights they would not cut their bill $6.
I don't think it will collapse the way you think. Almost all the cord cutting that's happening is non sports fans - because there is no way to stream popular sports like the NFL, college football etc. (I don't count stuff like Directv Now that's just the traditional MVPD packages delivered in a different way)
For now cord cutting only amounts to a couple percent of customers a year - the built in rate increases (let alone the bigger jumps when renegotiations happen) are larger than that so TV sports revenue is still increasing.
They might still come out OK - right now people pay about $30-$40/month of their bill for ALL sports (whether they watch or not) If they split it up so the NFL is one subscription, the NBA is another, college football is another and so forth they might be able to make up for the lack of people who don't watch helping pay for it. Or might not, it depends on how many people they can get to pay for it (versus sharing accounts, watching at friends houses or bars or giving it up)
So I think that's a decade away, major sports like football will be dragged off the broadcast channels and ESPN kicking and screaming, they are in no hurry to upset their revenue model because they don't know for sure if they will have to take a pay cut.
Can’t wait for the day. The first thing to go away are these athletes crazy salaries
I haven't seen any numbers on the age of sports viewership, but, based entirely on the younger people I know, very few of them are interested enough in sports to pay for cable/satellite/OTT. The ones that are interested are more likely to watch it at a bar or actually go to a game, although typically "someone else" would have paid for the tickets. Based on my limited sample size, that seems like a problem for sports programming revenues over time. Maybe I am in a bubble though. Like you said, it probably won't happen fast (enough).
People wanted ala-carte, so we got streaming services. Now people are saying there are too many streaming services and it's getting too expensive.
Yup. What's slowly happening (but really picking up speed here soon) is that the major content companies who own groups of cable and broadcast channels (plus movie and television studios) are going direct-to-consumer with their own streaming services that feature just their own stuff. You may be able to add in other companies' content as add-on subscriptions but you'll be able to buy, a la carte, just the stuff from Disney/ABC or WarnerMedia or NBCU or CBS/Viacom, etc.
Perhaps one day all of this will be retold in a mini-series, like a 21st century version of Pirates of Silicon Valley. The first episode might be called "Stream Wars" about the rise of a brash young hero named Netflix that aimed to transition from last-century DVD to the new-century technology of streaming video, first taking aim at King HBO but then broadening his scope to blow up the entire Cable TV Deathstar.
The second episode will pick up in fall 2020 and be called "Hollywood Strikes Back". But in this story, I'm not betting on the hero of episode one to completely triumph in the end.
I can see Netflix, the pioneer of digital streaming being the lone casualty in the space they created. They don't own enough content to be viable when the other studios pull their exclusives for their own platforms. Disney will become the new juggernaut in the space.
When people said they wanted ala carte they meant "I pay $80 a month for 200 channels, I want to pay $8 a month for just the 20 channels I watch". They didn't realize how that's impossible on several levels.
I agree. It is possible they won't even survive. They've never turned a real profit (borrowing several billion and showing a GAAP profit of less than a billion is not making money, unless you think taking $50K out on credit cards and putting $20K away in a savings account means you made money for the year)
I don't think subscribers will leave so much as they will no longer subscribe to them year round. Why bother, when subscribing for a month here and a month there is enough to binge watch any Netflix series / movies you want to see? People might have one or two services they subscribe to year round, but they will be Amazon (because no one gets Prime for the video, and you can't "binge shop" in the same way) and probably Disney (at least for those who have kids)
Once things turn sour for them and they can't borrow billions each year any longer, they'll have to start cutting budgets, which means less original content which means more subscribers flee...
My Smithsonian Channel is gone! That is literally the only reason that I pay Directv $10/month for the Movies Extra Package.
Well, let's give credit to the fact that Netflix has a HUGE first-mover advantage and has built up a lot of brand loyalty/force-of-habit with many Americans, especially those under 30. I think they're probably doing a decent job getting the YA and kid audiences invested in their Netflix Originals, which they consume on their phones and tablets (when they're not watching YouTube). And they've had some bona-fide big hits with adults too, including stuff that gets lots of acclaim. (They had the most Emmy noms last year and the second-most behind HBO this year.)
And think about the following: there's not a single streaming device or smart TV that anyone would have that doesn't come with Netflix pre-installed or a couple clicks away. And the Netflix app is also available on (and maybe to an extent systemwide-integrated into) set-top boxes from Comcast, DISH, Verizon, Cox, Altice and TiVo. Lots of device remotes have dedicated Netflix buttons.
I do think that Netflix, in the US at least, is going to get taken down a couple notches over the next couple of years but it's WAY too premature at this point to think that they're destined to be the new MySpace.
Netflix won't go away completely but their appeal will not be what it was 10 years ago. They created the streaming monster that will come back to bite them.
Smithsonian Channel Plus is available as a standalone subscription streaming service (including 4K HDR) for $5/mo.
Smithsonian Channel Plus: Home
Smithsonian Channel is a division of (oddly) Showtime Networks, which is a subsidiary of CBS, which is on the cusp of buying Viacom. I expect next year that we'll see a greatly enlarged CBS All Access service that has ingested the Viacom content. Maybe they'll just fold the Smithsonian stuff in there too (as it would be pretty light on that kind of knowledge-based content otherwise) and shut down Smithsonian Channel and SCPlus.
How does the cbs dispute affect the NFL package? Will certain games be blocked if they don't settle?
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