Disney, Spectrum End Cable Blackout, Nothing Meaningfully Changes
from the play-stupid-games,-win-stupid-prizes dept
Last week we discussed how a contract dispute between Charter (Spectrum) and Disney resulted in 15 million Charter customers losing access to more than 20 ABC and ESPN channels they pay for. We also noted how despite a lot of weird claims this standoff would somehow dramatically reshape television, that nothing would actually change and the only real outcome would be higher rates for consumers.
For some reason there were strangely a ton of articles about how this standoff would “change streaming forever” or “change television forever.” Numerous outlets claimed this standoff would be the end of the traditional cable bundle. There’s been an endless flood of these stupid disputes, but for whatever reason this was to be the standoff that would finally somehow fix the broken TV consumption model.
Of course none of that ever happened. Like most of these retransmission disputes the two sides struck a confidential new contract over the weekend nobody gets to see the full details of, and the two companies–who couldn’t shut up just a week ago–suddenly don’t actually want to talk publicly about:
“Disney and Charter didn’t immediately return requests for comment.”
None of the customers who lost access to Disney/ABC content get refunds. Any higher costs Charter winds up paying to carry Disney/ABC content gets passed on to consumers in the form of higher cable TV prices. And while the deal purportedly includes Charter customers getting some discounted access to ESPN and Disney streaming content if they subscribe to specific cable tiers, it’s nothing revelatory.
So where did the press’ get this idea that this deal was going to somehow change television as we know it? Charter executives, mostly. Charter, like most cable companies, spent years trying to downplay cord cutting and deluding themselves into thinking they didn’t have to compete with streaming competitors on price.
But during this retransmission dispute with Disney, Charter spent a lot of time pretending to be a serious disruptor, insisting that if Disney didn’t back off its demands for higher rates, Charter would somehow, magically and single-handedly, transform the cable TV sector:
“The video ecosystem is broken,” Winfrey declared during an investor call last Friday, adding ominously that “this is not a typical carriage dispute.” Winfrey reinforced his conviction that Charter is committed to pursuing a permanent shift away from the traditional cable TV business if a Disney renewal is not reached.
But it was just another typical carriage dispute. They happen pretty much constantly (here’s yet another one between Dish and Hearst that popped up this week). They routinely involve broadcasters demanding significantly more money for the same content, the two sides being unable to agree to a new contract like fucking adults, then taking out their dysfunction on overpaying customers.
Yeah, there’s a major transformation of the video industry happening thanks to streaming (though the streaming sector is trying its hardest to learn absolutely nothing from the sins of the past). But companies like Charter are almost always belatedly reactionary; any idea they’re on the cutting edge of disruption of any kind is wholly illusory. And debates like this are simply greedy people bickering over the arrangement of Titanic deck chairs (usually to the detriment of consumers). They’re not somehow inherently magic.
Filed Under: blackouts, retrans disputes, television, tv
Companies: charter spectrum, disney
Comments on “Disney, Spectrum End Cable Blackout, Nothing Meaningfully Changes”
“None of the customers who lost access to Disney/ABC content get refunds.”
Too bad customers ..
This is probably stated somewhere on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
This crap happens all the time in online journalism, I’ve noticed. One article will be published, and every other article after it will just transclude all the content from it and make the same false claims or baseless allegations. It’s incredibly destructive because it makes it seem like there’s a consensus on the facts and it allows misinformation to spread like wildfire.
I’m curious: who do people keep referring to these cable companies and their employees as “delusional” and such things? Isn’t it possible they know exactly what they’re doing, like the landline phone companies?
Cable TV is dying. It might take 50 years, but it’s on its way out and there’s no reason to think it’s coming back. So… why not milk those death throes for as much as you can? At this point, the people who still haven’t canceled are a bit of a captive market. Old people who don’t know how to use the internet, obviously, but also prisons, hotels, college dorms, etc.
Of course, the executives aren’t gonna say in plain English that their market is dying, that they’re overcharging old people just because they can, or that they’re bad at their jobs (or plan to jump ship before it all falls apart). No, they’re doing a great job of dealing with “changing demographics” in an “inflationary environment”, and other such code-phrases, and the investors better keep executive compensation at competitive levels to keep making money.
Re:
It’s not necessarily the cable companies that are responsible, it’s media companies milking the retransmission consent provisions in the 1992 Cable Television Act for all it’s worth that’s killing the cable industry.
Literally YIL, George W. Bush vetoed the legislation because he thought it would increase costs for consumers, but Congress overrode the veto. His reasoning has since been vindicated, as the law lacks appropriate protections to prevent blackouts or proper rate regulation to limit significant rate hikes.
Materially, it was a mistake to allow broadcasters to request royalties for carriage, without certain provisions (like percentage-based caps to retrans royalties; limiting royalty fees—with said fee caps—to local OTA stations; or structuring royalties as a flat, percentage-based rates that vary by channel format category, at levels similar to the rates which superstations received under Copyright Act provisions). It’s a pretty good question how pay TV pricing would be set today (and if traditional pay TV services were better able to compete with streaming in such a scenario), if retransmission royalties weren’t included in the Cable Act and must-carry was the standard rather than the option, per the law.
Re: golden parachute time
I knew cable TV was doomed about a decade ago when I cancelled and switched to streaming. I didn’t expect it to even take this long for linear TV to die. So what have those CEOs been doing in all that time, just twiddling their thumbs?
I think they know very well what’s going to happen and that they can’t stop it so they’re just playing caretaker of a dying system long enough to get their golden parachutes and jump.
Re: Re:
These things take forever. Basically, we’re waiting for the people who like linear TV to die. People under 40 have probably never (willingly) subscribed; those in their 50s and 60s may have already given up; but older people could stick with it till the end. My 90-year-old grandmother bitches about the cost, and occasionally talks the cable company into some kind of deal, but would never actually cancel. By the way, in case you haven’t seen the ads lately, they’re for things like long-distance service, bathtub-to-shower conversion, hearing aids—assuming the few annual hours I see at her house are representative, the advertisers and networks do have some idea what’s happening.
Anyway, the ’80s and ’90s seemed to be a time of launching new networks. Fox became popular (though Married With Children had often joked about its obscurity), while UPN and the WB never did—and got combined into the CW in 2006. As a Canadian, I perceive the big 4 networks as being pretty well known, unlike the “new” one(s). Note that nobody’s tried to launch a TV network since.
My guess is that a network will be the first big linear-TV failure, and the CW is the obvious (if you’ve heard of it) candidate. The cable companies aren’t gonna fail, ’cause they’ve mostly pushed everything onto DOCSIS and just gradually reduce the bandwidth allocated to TV. Eventually they’ll “sneak” everyone onto on-demand IPTV, now that they’ve got everyone used to needing slow and shitty set-top boxes, and it’ll get cheaper and cheaper to run. Like how the big ISPs still run e-mail accounts, though no new subscriber signs up for them.
The CEOs, when not setting up golden parachutes or lobbying, have probably spent their time on internet service.
more a symptom than anything else
The Disney-Charter fracas is just a symptom of the ongoing breakdown in linear TV. Expect more fights like this to break out. Dying systems tend to thrash around in their death throes.
Anyone who still subscribes to cable TV might consider getting out now and not waiting for the phone lines to be jammed by everyone trying to cancel at once.
Who really watches cable TV nowadays?
Re:
Old people, prisoners, hotel guests who didn’t torrent stuff to watch ahead of time and are unwilling to pay extra for a fancy hotel’s wi-fi (wi-fi invariably being free at any non-fancy hotel). Perhaps the people of Portland Oregon, if the dream of the ’90s is still alive there.
Corporations intend to turn EVERYTHING into a subscription service, while at the same time degrading the quality of each component in the name of the Holy Profit.
Carriage disputes - Cox Media
My local Fox station is owned by Cox Media, who has been in a carriage dispute with Dish since end-November ’22. Of course they’re whining about being able to serve their customers and pointing them to the other providers (surprisingly including Hulu, YouTube & Fubo streaming) and OTA antenna. Doesn’t look like it’s settling anytime soon.
C'mon Karl. Get your facts straight.
Let’s count how many mistakes/errors Karl has included in this article to push his narrative…
If Karl kept up on his old site dslreports.com, he would have seen the thread where Charter customers received a $15.00 refund.
Disney+ and ESPN+ are free – not discounted. This is huge. Disney was double-dipping and making people pay for content twice. Charter was able to get DTC streaming content to be included with their cable subscription – FOR NO ADDITIONAL COST!
Karl completely missed the boat on the bundling concessions that Charter extracted from Disney. Disney is famous for forcing the cable TV providers to bundle all of their crappy channels into mandatory packages. Charter finally broke that with this deal. This will lead to new cheaper tiers and packages that are not bloated with Disney crap. This is huge and does change the cable TV model for the better.
“Charter got another big win in no longer having to take on, and pay for, eight lesser Disney cable networks with much lower viewership while providing what the two companies called in a joint release “a more curated lineup of 19 networks.”
Analysts estimated that curation will save Charter $300 million a year in carriage fees for the excluded networks. But it almost certainly signs a death warrant for the networks, which include Baby TV, Disney Junior, Disney XD, Freeform, FXM, FXX, Nat Geo Wild and Nat Geo Mundo.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dbloom/2023/09/13/how-charter-disney-deal-scrambles-tv-industry/?sh=397181495446
Duh ...
I didn’t expect a thing to change with the exception of a price hike in six months,