• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer, April 2, 2015

Way back when “Saturday Night Live” was new in 1975, one of its first catch phrases became “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.” Though gravely ill, the Spanish dictator just wouldn’t kick. Finally, he did. The weeks of those network deathwatches prompted then-funny Chevy Chase to joke the opposite way on SNL’s “Weekend Update,” assuring us Franco was, indeed, not coming back.

With that in mind, this just in from Moody’s Investors Service: Cable is still not dead. But increasingly, Moody’s says, it’s being kept alive by its ISP end of the business.

A new Moody’s report, "High Yield Cable's Broadband Still Effective Defense Against Over-the-Top Siege," as highlighted here and there, says “cable remains strongly positioned for at least the next few years on the strength of the broadband business, limited competition and customer inertia." 

That, I think, might be called the Blockbuster strategy.

OTT is catching on, Moody’s says, but its effect on media is “evolutionary rather than revolutionary.”  It's probably accurate, and definitely funny, that Moody’s says cable still has customer laziness in its corner. Television is built on that whole lean-back-and-have-a-beer couch potato thing. That’s how TV devises its schedule, though it all worked better before the remote. Works for cable too.

Moody’s suggests, not too gently, that cable operators try to remind their customers that cable is ...  good.

“The average customer may not realize how much content traditional pay TV service provides, from video on demand and across multiple devices,” Moody’s vice president Karen Berckmann writes. “Customers are often more willing to give new entrants a break on any operational hiccups merely out of a predisposition to prefer anyone over a traditional cable company.”  Well. How rude.

But that’s it in a nutshell. If only cable customers didn’t loathe cable, maybe they’d like cable. Good luck with that. The University of Michigan’s American Consumer Satisfaction survey shows Comcast and Time Warner are the two most hated brands in America, with other smaller cable companies also prominently represented.

AND NOW THIS: It’s not all video advertising, but still ...  eMarketer reports that in 2016, global mobile advertising will top $100 billion and, for the first time, account for 51% of all digital advertising in the whole wide world.

By 2019, mobile ad spending will account for one of every four ad dollars spent and 70% of all money spent on digital advertising. Next year there will be 2 billion smartphone users worldwide, and there will be 1 billion tablet users by the end of the year. (They will never convince my sister. When she goes, it will be like LBJ losing Walter Cronkite's support for the war in Vietnam.)

Last year, sliced just to U.S. trends, eMarketer said that ad spending on mobile video (smartphones and tablets) will make up just 10% of all mobile spend by 2018, but 44.3% of all digital video ad spending.

pj@mediapost.com