First lets look at a news article: Disney, Charter reach agreement to end ESPN, ABC blackout.
The article covered in the video below is from Bloomberg, but that article is behind a paywall.
Financial terms weren’t immediately known, but the companies said Monday that Charter won rights to include the ad-supported Disney+ and ESPN+ streaming services in its pay-TV packages. Charter, which sells pay-TV service under the Spectrum brand, also gets the streamed version of the flagship ESPN network when that service launches in the future.
Disney collects $9 per month from every cable subscriber. And they wanted more, in spite of the fact that cable is shrinking, and the outrageous cost is one of the reasons.
Yes, the ad-based version of Disney+ and ESPN+ will now be included in a monthly cable bill. Though you have to be subscribed to some extra level of sport programming (regional sports networks) to get the ESPN+.
It will no longer offer Baby TV, Disney Junior, Disney XD, Freeform, FXM, FXX, Nat Geo Wild and Nat Geo Mundo, the companies said.
These are the channels that no one was watching anyway. They were paying for them because that is the way it things were always done.
This is the Valiant Renegade video Disney CAVES to Cable TV | MASSIVE Streaming SHIFT in POWER | ESPN Monday Night Football | Disney +
Disney has completely caved in to nearly every demand by Charter/Spectrum.
If Disney hadn't done something, they would have had to pay refunds to a bunch of advertisers for losses related to Monday Night Football. Charter/Spectrum has a lock on the state of New York, and the 2 teams playing Monday were Buffalo Bills and New York Jets. Disney didn't want to lose that ad revenue.
Since seeing this video, I've seen a couple of articles in which Bob Iger is quoted saying, "Linear TV is dead." That's an interesting statement given that he just gave the linear TV guys everything they wanted, including access to streaming.
if cable went ala carte most of the channels on cable would be gone. msnbc, cnn, and the rest of the propaganda outlets.
ReplyDeleteThat is what cable has wanted to to do, but the providers usually have one thing that people want. In the case of Disney, that was ESPN.
Delete"You want to offer ESPN to your customers? Fine, give the basic to everyone - even if the don't want it - and also give them Disney Baby, Disney teen, Disney whatever and pay us a huge fee." That fee was on every cable bill in America. Isn't hard to see how Disney made a lot of money, especially before they went Woke, and people actually wanted some of their content.