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It feels empty, going back to talking about television and the future of video at a time when it feels like, for a young liberal like myself, we might not have a future of any kind at all, but there was some news this week that made me reflect on one of my older posts and how the television landscape is shifting.

In 2012, Comcast was looking for something to do with its ten-year-old video game channel, G4, which had been dropped by DirecTV two years earlier and seemed to be inexorably on the wane. It eventually decided to rebrand it to the Esquire Network, a joint venture with Esquire magazine. Two weeks before the rebrand was to finally take effect, Comcast, now in control of NBC Universal, decided to rebrand the Style network as Esquire instead, figuring that Style’s female-oriented programming was now redundant with Bravo and Oxygen, and giving Esquire a slot that actually had DirecTV carriage. G4 would remain on the air under that name, endlessly rerunning its back library, until its existing carriage agreements ran out, and it was finally taken out of its misery a little over two years ago.

That Comcast was willing to rebrand Style as Esquire Network without having anything else to do with G4’s space was surprising to me, because as I wrote shortly before G4 was put out of its misery, the trend in the cable business seemed to be to constantly rebrand channels until companies found a format that stuck, holding on to established channel space and using whatever channel hadn’t caught on to launch the next format idea that came to the suits. Which brings me to this week, and the news that came out Wednesday that Comcast will be shutting down Esquire Network’s linear feed later this year, converting it to a digital on-demand service. On one level, that Comcast replaced Style, not G4, with the Esquire Network means they have now effectively killed two channels instead of one. But on another level, there’s no guarantee Comcast wouldn’t be shutting down Style now anyway, if they hadn’t already done so. In that sense, Comcast may have simply been ahead of its time, knowing that it might not have any new channel ideas with which to replace either Style or G4 – for both channels, the alternative to giving Esquire Network a try would be a full shutdown.

The notion of “cable network musical chairs” was from the start rooted in one of the dynamics captured in my book, The Game to Show the Games. As described in Chapter 7, for many years the Big Nine companies that control most of the channels on your cable lineup were able to use their popular channels to bully cable operators into carrying less popular channels. By about ten years ago, it became nearly impossible to launch a new channel from scratch unless you could convince cable operators it would have a built-in audience from the start, and since then the only channels the Big Nine have attempted to launch from scratch have been regional and college-conference-affiliated sports networks. But outright closing a network and giving up its channel space was unheard of. Until G4, the only truly national cable networks to completely shut down since the 2004 closure of CNNfn and TechTV were ABC News Now, which had highly limited distribution to begin with, and SoapNet, which only survived the launch of Disney Junior because of Disney’s inability to get cable operators to swap one out with the other. It made sense to keep a channel around, just to squat on the space, until you came up with a new idea for what to do with it, knowing that unless things became truly dire cable operators would continue to carry it.

Of course, the same phenomenon that keeps companies from launching new channels from scratch also makes it difficult to relaunch existing channels and attract enough of an audience to make up from the audience lost from the old format, especially in the age of cord-cutting where starting up a new linear network seems like a decidedly outmoded, foolish proposition, if you don’t have any of the live events that are the main purpose of linear television going forward, or any established shows moved from other networks. It’s become decidedly obvious to all parties involved that the cable network landscape is badly oversaturated, but I felt that, without cord-cutting accelerating substantially, no one had any incentive to shrink it – so long as the Big Nine could still get cable companies to carry them, they had no reason to shutter any of them and deprive themselves of a revenue stream. Rerunning old content over and over would still bring in more money than losing the space without being able to get it back if you had a better programming idea.

There is some evidence, though, that cable companies are getting more and more empowered to at least try to dump networks they see as worthless, as they look for ways to shrink their packages to deliver more value and more reason for people to sign up for them. As much as online pay-TV services like Sling TV and PlayStation Vue have failed to live up to their promise of slimmed-down channel lineups, instead carrying most of the Big Nine’s entire portfolios, they’ve still placed some pressure on the Big Nine to shrink down what they have to carry, especially coupled with traditional cable companies’ efforts to create truly “skinny bundles”.

It’s hard to say what the tipping point was. By the time A&E Networks followed through with its announced replacement of H2 with the Viceland network in February, it was already widely ridiculed despite the head of Vice boasting that it would “return millennials to cable TV”. The general consensus was that Vice had no illusions of reaching “millennials” by any means other than online, and a linear network would simply broaden who it could reach at very little cost to Vice itself with the potential to bring in additional ad revenue. Al Jazeera America shut down two months later without replacement, despite the efforts of OneAmerica News Network to take over the space, in part because it wasn’t backed by any of the Big Nine. The same goes for the October shutdown of the Pivot network, itself already a merger of the Documentary Channel and Halogen network. The shutdown of Esquire, triggered by both AT&T and Charter looking to dump it, suggests the Big Nine’s bundling practices won’t insulate them from having to cut down on their networks.

To be sure, the Big Nine will continue to play musical chairs for as long as they can – Comcast is reportedly also looking into converting Oxygen into an outlet for crime dramas – but if the shutdown of Esquire is any indication, we may finally be about to see a market correction as the cable network landscape contracts to just those networks that are absolutely necessary, or at least sustainable. Losing Esquire on its own won’t cause anyone to dump cable, but if the trend accelerates fast enough, as more networks shut down there will be less of a reason for those subscribers that remain to keep their cable subscription, and eventually we should reach an equilibrium where cable is priced low enough to actually be worth the cost for those subscribed to it, while the migration of the “lost” content to the Internet, heralded by Esquire’s conversion to a digital platform tied to the Esquire magazine web site, will minimize the damage from the contraction and increase the value of cord-cutting. We could be seeing the start of the formation of the video landscape of the future. Again, assuming there is a future.

Ever since the Aereo controversy caused broadcast networks to threaten to pull their signals from the free airwaves, I’ve long accused broadcasters as a whole of being led by retransmission consent to disdain their own nominal medium. But it’s not a coincidence that ground zero of the Aereo controversy was New York, the single largest market in the nation where most of the biggest stations are owned and operated by their networks. The networks are on the front lines of fighting with cable networks for sports and other content, and are deeply aware of the advantages of the cable business model. Many of them have substantial investments in cable networks themselves or would like to have them.

Their affiliates are a lot harder to read. On the one hand, many affiliate owners were pursuing cash in retransmission consent negotiations even before the networks got in on it. The National Association of Broadcasters, which is supposed to represent broadcasters as a whole, has fought hard to preserve the retransmission consent system as it is and to weaken ownership restrictions so station owners can get more leverage at the expense of the overall viability of broadcasting. And certainly affiliated stations aren’t falling over themselves to improve their coverage areas any more than their networks are. So it’s pretty clear that affiliate groups, like their networks, staunchly try to preserve their retransmission consent revenue against forces trying to disrupt it. But are they willing to go so far as to give up their identity the way the networks are?

On the surface, there is reason to think they wouldn’t, simply because if the networks went cable-only they would effectively shut the affiliates out entirely, but during the Aereo affair Fox only threatened to take away the most valuable programming that seemed to most need retransmission consent to support it, and pretty much seemed set to simply insert their programming into affiliates’ feeds they sent to cable companies, allowing them to keep the affiliates in the process, and they seemed fine with that. More tellingly, I don’t think any broadcasters, no matter how small, vouched for Aereo’s argument that they were simply broadening broadcast stations’ reach, nor did affiliates indicate that they were in any way resisting the moves their networks seemed to be making to undermine broadcasting except insofar as it undermined their own access to top-tier programming, and even then in utterly ineffectual ways; certainly keeping the CW and MyNetworkTV alive in their current forms suggested they had no ambitions to improve the relevance of broadcasting as a whole. So my assumption was that the affiliates understood the perceived importance of retransmission consent to their business and to their networks’ ability to compete with cable networks, and so wouldn’t do anything to make broadcast more viable and would present a united front to preserve retrans and keep people tied to the cable bundle, with some potentially bailing in the incentive auction out of a belief that broadcasting isn’t viable on its own (and certainly the fact the FCC’s initial clearing target is the maximum possible suggests broadcasting is being as undervalued as I’ve long feared).

But there was always reason to think the networks were overselling the importance of retrans and their signal-pulling threat had more to do with their cable-network offerings than any actual importance of retrans; after all, contrary to popular belief advertising is sufficient to pay broadcast networks’ NFL rights fees and even Fox’s deal with the BCS, the one it ended up losing to ESPN because they couldn’t pay enough to make up ESPN’s subscription fee advantage and kicking off the retrans mania to begin with, actually made money for them without needing to be a loss leader. At the same time, someone was leading the charge to develop ATSC M/H and ATSC 3.0, technologies that hold (or held) the promise to increase the usefulness and viability of broadcasting as a technology without, by themselves, changing the economic incentives favoring cable, and while the networks seemed reticent to lend their full support behind ATSC 3.0, the largest non-network station groups were pretty much staunchly behind it, and while they’ve never quite fought the forces undermining their industry as strenuously as I might like (and in some cases have doubled down on them), the NAB and several other groups representing broadcasters have made many of the same pro-broadcasting arguments that I’ve made on this blog, even if they’ve come across as more self-serving lip service than actually being reflected in their actual policy recommendations, which suggest they’re more interested in protecting incumbents than in the actual overall relevance of broadcasting. And while they never quite addressed the question, reading between the lines of their FCC filings, by and large station owners seemed fine with over-the-top providers omitting broadcast stations from their offerings.

Which brings me to what really has me scratching my head: TV Everywhere. In the wake of the Aereo affair, the Big Four networks have all rolled out apps allowing you to access their programming and a live feed of your local station, so long as you “authenticate” with a cable or satellite provider. In theory, these apps are a centralized clearinghouse to watch any station associated with the network, regardless of who owns them, and have been explicitly pitched to affiliates this way, with CBS All Access offering most of its affiliates through the service. The ABC and NBC apps, however, still only include their respective owned-and-operated stations, with CBS reaching an agreement with Cablevision for authenticated access to their O&Os a few months ago and Fox offering no stream of any of its stations through the app. The only markets where all the Big Four stations are owned-and-operated are New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the Bay Area, so as a result of this, among other things, those markets plus Dallas and Miami were the only ones PlayStation Vue was operating in. This despite Hearst being announced as a partner with Watch ABC pretty much as soon as the app itself was announced, yet their stations remain absent nearly three years later – supposedly because of the need to reach agreements with the cable companies, but if Hearst was in charge of that there’s little reason for that to be a problem if they were as into it as ABC itself was, and if ABC was in charge of that you’d think they’d have already struck those agreements to begin with, and in any case there’s not much reason to announce Hearst jumping on board if it wasn’t going to actually smooth out the negotiations with cable companies. It does suggest that, on the surface, it’s understandable that three-way negotiations between network, affiliate, and cable company would be difficult to make work, and ABC just announced a “clearinghouse” intended to make it easier for stations to latch on to their existing agreements with DirecTV and PlayStation Vue for streaming, with Hearst stated to be taking part with the former. But other recent developments suggest it may be too late.

Last month, PlayStation Vue, evidently fed up with the slow progress of reaching agreements with non-owned-and-operated stations, rolled out its service nationwide (and to devices other than the PlayStation itself), omitting broadcast networks entirely in the new markets with “Slim” options $10 cheaper than the equivalent full-service options, but not giving customers in its existing markets the ability to sign up for the “slim” packages. This raises the prospect the networks feared with Aereo: people paying for cable channels including ESPN but watching broadcast networks without paying for them if they can get them with an antenna, outside of markets where PS Vue was already offering them. Then, a couple weeks ago, rival Sling TV made that prospect explicit by reportedly introducing a new “AirTV” box that enables broadcast content received over-the-air to be integrated with Sling’s own offerings in Sling’s programming guide, regardless of whether Sling has an agreement with the station or even the network in question. I’m not sure I agree with the implied notion of continuing to treat linear television as something special and separate regardless of its nature, putting all linear television into a single, separate app as though linear television itself is the product, and as such Sling isn’t really doing anything it wasn’t already doing by its own nature, but integration of OTA content on streaming boxes can be hit-or-miss enough that AirTV can still encourage people to pick up broadcast stations over-the-air without paying for them, if they can. More to the point, it sounds like Sling can then deliver the broadcast content to any device, like a legitimate use of what Aereo was doing, actually providing some usefulness to the product.

To put this in perspective, last week Dish and Viacom avoided a potentially nasty and damaging carriage dispute with an agreement that will put Viacom’s channels on SlingTV, to the confusion and disappointment of analysts who felt Dish “caved” in not standing up to a Viacom that Suddenlink and Cable One have already seemed to do well enough without. Coupled with the inclusion of Fox in the new multi-screen bundle and the mutual interest on both sides to add ESPN and the other Disney networks to it as well, explicitly hiking the price and obviating everything I said about its potential impact, it seems like Sling TV is coming awfully close to recreating the entire bloated cable bundle just like PS Vue, putting the lie to all the public statements Dish made at its launch about wanting to keep it slimmed down to provide maximum value, and making me wonder, if they really did mean those things, if the Dish-Viacom deal pointed to ESPN acting as the Godfather of the cable bundle in keeping it together at all costs, certainly in keeping Viacom dependent on it. Putting aside anything else, if Sling TV and PS Vue weren’t going to actually provide anything different from the existing cable bundles, it would seem that the cable companies could pretty easily put them out of business, even without shady tactics, by lowering their prices to make a cable/internet bundle competitive with internet plus Sling or Vue and/or making it easier to watch their linear television content on a streaming device… that is, if they weren’t hamstrung by the need to charge retransmission consent to all their customers. Sling TV and PS Vue’s ability to offer broadcast stations separately or not at all, allowing people to rely on an antenna to receive them, could well be their one major, vital advantage over traditional cable television, what allows them to continue providing value even with a traditional bloated cable bundle. I didn’t agree with Rich Greenfield that retransmission consent was the major factor causing the cable bundle to lose its perceived value, but if Sling TV and PS Vue can continue making it optional, it may well prove to be traditional cable’s fatal flaw.

The funny thing about this is that other companies have felt that finding a way to untangle the thicket of broadcast stations was so vital that Apple outright gave up on creating its own Apple TV service when it couldn’t negotiate with broadcast stations. Indeed, PS Vue itself not only offered broadcast stations in its launch markets but included them in its base packages, forcing everyone to pay for them, and showed every indication of applying the same to any market it expanded to. PS Vue wanted to play by broadcasters’ rules, yet when the affiliates couldn’t get their act together, leaving the service still stuck with just the O&Os, PS Vue decided “screw it” and took its service nationwide without broadcast stations, effectively costing the affiliates their opportunity to make OTT work for them and not against them. If Sling TV and PS Vue prove successful enough without broadcast stations, Apple and other companies that felt they had to offer them may decide that, at the very least, they’re not worth the hassle, and broadcasters will have completely missed the boat, left to see the gap between them and cable networks widen again, and seeing cable operators redouble their efforts to undo or shake up retrans.

Again, it’s possible the affiliates just didn’t grasp the importance of getting some deal, any deal done before Sony decided to go without them… but this has me wondering whether the affiliates deliberately dragged their feet as part of a larger effort to make broadcast the center of the broadcast industry again. Perhaps the affiliates really don’t want to be as dependent on cable-style bundles as their networks want them to be, and recognize that it is killing broadcasting as a medium and that nurturing the creation of a large base of people aware of and exploiting broadcasters’ free over-the-air signals is vital to broadcasting’s long-term survival (even if it might hit their pocketbooks in the short-term), by creating a group of people interested in the fate of the medium and ultimately providing motivation for broadcasters to actually invest in their signals and in technology to make them easier to access on a wider variety of devices. Perhaps they felt all along that they preferred to rely on ATSC 3.0 as their ticket to reach mobile devices and that there was no reason for cord-cutting to work to its detriment rather than its benefit. Or perhaps it’s a combination of both and they haven’t yet grasped that Sling TV and PS Vue haven’t been the threats to the cable bundle they thought they would be (not helped by uncritical media coverage that has treated them as “a boon to cord-cutters” without questioning whether someone signing up to either service is truly living up to the spirit of cord-cutting), or just didn’t anticipate “cable minus broadcast” being the niche “skinny bundles” would occupy so early, before “cable minus sports” or something else that would actually deconstruct the cable bundle… or maybe they don’t even care about that and care more about getting broadcast out of its cable-imposed ghetto.

By goading PS Vue into encouraging customers to pick up broadcast stations with an antenna while still delivering them cable channels, broadcasters may have dealt themselves a fatal blow. But if Sling TV and PS Vue have the effect of encouraging widespread antenna adoption, it may well prove the best thing to happen to broadcasting as a whole.

“Skinny bundles” have long been an overhyped disappointment. Cable companies offering sports-free packages have been hamstrung by contractural provisions and legal threats from offering them all that widely, when they’ve bothered to promote them at all. And efforts to create over-the-top offerings, like Sling TV, have kept most of the most expsnsive channels, including ESPN, thus preserving, not undermining, the worst parts of the cable bundle.

Last week Sling TV unveiled a new “beta” multi-screen offering, allowing customers to stream Sling TV content on up to three screens, rather than the single screen their existing offering was limited to. But that’s not the only difference between the multi-screen and single-screen offerings. For the first time, the multi-screen offering provides access to the Fox networks, including FX, FS1, and Fox’s RSNs. And perhaps more to the point, the multi-screen offering does not include ESPN or the other Disney networks. For the first time, there is a widely-available linear TV service that can actually free you from paying the ESPN tax.

The new multi-screen offering is not perfect; for one thing, Fox is nearly as much of a contributor to the high price of the cable bundle as ESPN, through FS1 and especially its regional sports networks, though Sling does not appear to be offering Fox News. So subscribers to the new package may not be subsidizing ESPN, but if they have no interest in sports they’re still subsidizing expensive regional sports networks, and unlike with the single-stream product broadcast networks are included so you’re paying retransmission consent (or at least making up Fox’s share of it) even if you can get Fox with an antenna. Sports fans are still hitched to the entire cable bundle, and FS1 offers few sports whose fans can go without ESPN or other sports networks (basically the UFC, NHRA, and that’s it). As a result of Fox’s own high price, the new service’s $20 price tag offers no savings over the single-screen product, so it might seem like someone would only switch to it if they’ve read my book and are dropping ESPN out of principle, especially since the Discovery networks are also missing so anyone who wants any of them will be stuck with the single-stream offering and paying the ESPN tax.

But if you’re someone who’s interested in Sling TV for reasons other than ESPN, if your interest revolves around the AMC, A&E, and Scripps networks (and Turner as well), you’re going to gravitate to the service that actually allows you to stream the content on multiple screens. And for sports fans, local sports is arguably more of a motivator to remain signed up for cable than ESPN is, and while fans of local teams can’t necessarily go without ESPN entirely, since ESPN has a significant number of exclusive baseball and basketball games including Sunday Night Baseball, one baseball wild-card game, and one of the NBA’s Conference Finals, fans of teams on Fox networks can still watch most of their games without paying the ESPN tax, especially if the teams aren’t that good.

A part of me thinks that Disney and Discovery are just the only two companies that haven’t given Dish the right to offer their content on multiple screens and this is just Dish’s way of pushing them to re-do their deal, meaning ESPN will be there to inflate the price of the offering and keep people paying the ESPN tax soon enough (as Disney seemed to imply in a statement), making this not that different from when PlayStation Vue didn’t include ESPN until earlier this year. But Sling is a lot more visible, and provides more cost savings over a more traditional bundle, than PS Vue ever did, and it’s not exactly obvious that ESPN will eventually join the multi-screen offering. Unless and until it does or Dish ends up nerfing it in other ways, people looking to save money on their cable subscriptions now have a viable option that deprives ESPN of their revenue stream and broad reach that allows them to keep high-profile sports hostage to the cable bundle. And if AMC and Scripps find the multi-screen offering attractive enough, they may just decide they don’t need to be propped up by sports networks at all – and that’s when the real threat to ESPN’s business model begins.