Media Man Blog
Streaming vs Cable Channel news; Writers Strike shines more light; Streaming entertainment disruption to business models afoot
Most U.S and global streaming services continue to be unprofitable, with Neflix being the exception, with most studios still shooting for 2025 to break even. The subscriber televison business continues to decline in quality most people believe, but not all will admit. Sports and news media channels continue to seek out other options and business models.
On Friday morning, Charter Communications held a conference call with Wall Street analysts where it said it was prepared to abandon its video business if it couldn’t come to a “transformative” deal with The Walt Disney Co. to try and salvage the pay TV bundle. The company is one of the top pay TV providers domestically, with 14.7 million subscribers — just short of leader Comcast’s 14.9 million but above satellite rivals DirecTV (12.3 million) and Dish (6.9 million). Charter, like those other pay TV firms, has also lost video subs, about 200,000, in its latest quarter, per a Leichtman Research tally.
“We’re on the edge of a precipice. We’re either moving forward with a new collaborative video model, or we’re moving on,” Charter CEO Chris Winfrey said on the call. “This is not a typical carriage dispute. It’s significant for Charter, and we think it’s even more significant for programmers and the broader video ecosystem.”
Charter, in a Powerpoint presentation that accompanied the call, wrote that “programmers are caught in a self-imposed dilemma as they have moved content to their DTC products for short-term profit maximization and their management teams are not incentivized to drive business for the long-term,” arguing that studios like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery chose to wreck their pay TV business (by moving most original shows to subscription video on-demand services, and pushing for higher and higher fees for sports channels) to pursue the streaming riches that Netflix promised.
“As an industry we failed to come together quickly to create that consumer friendly product,” Winfrey said. “Programmers then made high value content available for anyone to access on websites, and soon thereafter through emerging streaming applications such as Hulu, which was initially free. At the same time programmers believed that their content libraries could create so called incremental streaming service revenues by selling this content to Netflix.”
Media Man Wrap-Up
Something is going to give. It's a perfect storm approaching. This comes are most streaming TV viewers globally are turning off the paid services in favor of other freed channels such as Tubi @Tubi , YouTube @YouTube /YouTube Movies, and seeking out other TV streaming channels with more legacy content such as Australia's SBS On Demand @SBSOnDemand Some people are even focussing more on making more of their own content, or just spending more time in nature, at the beach and in non- tech endeavors.
(Sources: Wires, AP, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Charter Communications, The Wall Street Journal and X @X (formally Twitter buzz)
