Commentary
Silver TV Lining: Goodbye To Smaller Cable Channels? When Less Is More
- by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, October 10, 2023
TV network groups that have anywhere from 15 to 20 channels might have good reason to worry about their next negotiations with legacy pay TV services.
Those groups might be smaller -- thanks to Charter Communications and its reworked carriage deal with Walt Disney.
The upside, if there is one, …
Wayne Friedman is West Coast Editor of MediaPost. You can reach Wayne at wayne@mediapost.com.
Wayne, total revenues for "long tail" cable channels that are threatened with extinction is only one metric. Another is how profitable they are and how they contribute to corporate profits. Since the TV programmers have been willing to gamble on launching streaming services on the premise that they will, eventually, become profitable, it follows that they must evaluate their cable channels in the same manner. Once carriage fees disappear for the smaller cable channels they cease to be profitable and must be let go or otherwise downsized into online phantom entities. By doing so the corporations' overal profit margins may actually improve---even if there is a small loss in total revenues.