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Can Streaming TV Providers Make Inroads on YouTube TV with Some Surprisingly Simple Steps?

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After thinking about it for the better part of a decade, my dad finally bit the bullet and dropped Spectrum cable this summer. What pushed him over the edge was being sold on T-Mobile Home Internet to supplement his T-Mobile cell plan, even though his T-Mobile cell signal isn’t particularly reliable in our apartment. (It works well enough that we don’t have any real problems with the Home Internet service dropping out even though we have the router on a ledge a decent distance away from any windows or doors.) Frontier fiber was also an option and one we considered last year, and probably would bring better, more reliable speeds, but I think he didn’t want the rigamarole of installing all the stuff that would entail compared to plugging in one router. But while Frontier offers a bundle with YouTube TV, T-Mobile has no such thing, and instead offers a plan that comes with subscriptions to the with-ads plans of Hulu and Paramount+; I don’t know if that can defray the cost of a more expensive plan, but if it does then it’s Hulu+Live TV, normally comparably priced to YouTube TV, that benefits from a T-Mobile Home Internet plan. Nonetheless, my dad signed up for YouTube TV and I didn’t object, and we didn’t have any reason to ditch it once the free trial ran out.

This despite the fact that we found YouTube TV’s interface overrated. By reputation, YouTube TV has the best interface and experience of any streaming TV provider, but coming to it from cable was not a smooth transition. This is especially the case early on when the algorithm hasn’t figured out which shows and channels you actually like and half the suggestions that show up are things you don’t care about. Leave that aside, and some of the quirks can’t be helped given the limitations of most streaming device remotes; on the Roku remote, a streaming service has a directional pad, an OK button, and a Back⬅️ button to work with, and if you’re lucky can find creative things to do with the DVR controls. So it’s unsurprising that there isn’t a one-button way to “channel surf” like there was on cable, or a number pad to pull up a specific channel instantly; that does mean that, if the channel you’re looking for is deep enough in the guide and the program you’re looking for doesn’t show up in the list of suggestions at the top of the Home or Live screens, you’re in for a lot of scrolling, but you can reorder the channel lineup to put the channels you actually watch at the top and mitigate that.

Nonetheless, there isn’t an easy way to pull up a description of the program you’re currently watching, and it’s even harder to pull up full descriptions of shows if the space on the Live (Guide) view isn’t sufficient; even for future shows hitting OK will generally pull up info on the show as a whole, not the specific episode or event in that time slot. If you want to scroll the guide more than a day into the future, there’s no way to advance the guide a day at a time like there is on a cable remote; the Rewind⏪ and Fast Forward⏩ buttons on the Roku remote do nothing on the guide, which seems like a missed opportunity. And while it at least used to be possible to put up the full-screen view and continue the program you were watching in the background, at some point in the last few months that stopped being the case, with the current program shutting off if you hit the Back button with no way I can tell to avoid it, which also means returning to the current program isn’t as simple as pressing Up until you’re above the menu bar.

To some degree, this is all stuff that just took some getting used to. For the most part, me and Dad have reached the point of handling the YouTube TV interface fairly smoothly. But all the talk of YouTube TV having the gold standard interface of streaming TV providers seems overblown; there are definitely some places where I could make improvements. And most other streaming TV providers have reached parity on the more concrete features where YouTube has historically stood out; Sling is the only major streaming TV provider that doesn’t offer unlimited DVR for no extra charge, for example. Multiview is now the feature where YouTube TV stands out the most, but it’s not such an overwhelming advantage that people are likely to look past more concrete issues for it. At the least, it doesn’t seem like YouTube TV’s interface and general experience is such an overwhelming advantage that no one can take a bite out of it, that the lack of, say, MLB Network shouldn’t drive people who would otherwise watch it away because the interface is so amazing.

And yet, it is. So much so that it may be leading Disney, for the first time ever, to be losing a carriage dispute. And it might say a lot more about other streaming TV providers than YouTube TV.

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Wither the Linear Cable Network?

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On Monday, three years after WarnerMedia was spun off from AT&T and merged with Discovery to form Warner Bros. Discovery, the company announced that it was splitting back apart. WBD will split into a “Streaming and Studios” company consisting of the various studios, mostly Warner Bros-branded but also including DC Studios, as well as HBO and the streaming service about to be re-renamed back to HBO Max, and a “Global Networks” company with all of the current WBD’s non-HBO linear networks as well as the discovery+ streaming service.

This comes on the heels of Comcast announcing its plans to split off most of its linear cable networks (except Bravo) to a new company to be called Versant, and it might seem like WBD is playing follow-the-leader, splitting off everything that’s not actively contributing to its streaming business to get its fading linear cable businesses off the books. But there are some key differences. Most of the networks Comcast is spinning off don’t really provide much value on their own; USA airs sports content but most of it was purchased by NBCUniversal, usually with NBCSN being the originally intended cable outlet, and will now effectively be sublicensed out to Versant, and NBCU’s most recent major sports rights deals with the Big Ten and NBA have left out USA entirely in favor of signing rights for the NBC broadcast network and Peacock alone. Very few Versant outlets air much in the way of truly original programming, at least outside cheap true crime documentaries; the main outlets producing real value on their own would probably be CNBC and MSNBC.

That is not the case with the WBD split. While Comcast is keeping all of NBC Universal’s sports rights, the sports rights WBD holds under the TNT and Eurosport banners will be going with the “Global Networks” division, which I’ll be referring to as “Turner Discovery” for the rest of this post while referring to “Streaming and Studios” as “Warner Bros.” CNN is still a going concern and arguably still a stronger news brand than MSNBC, plus there’s all the documentary and reality programming from the Discovery networks and kids’ and other animated programming on Cartoon Network. (In fact, there’s an open question as to whether or not Cartoon Network will really be separated from the studio that effectively produces all of its programming – and it’s an especially pressing question at Adult Swim, which effectively is Williams Street, the studio that not only produces all of its original programming but runs the network/block.) All of this would be valuable content for any streaming service; indeed, Turner Discovery will not only be coming with an existing streaming service in discovery+, but is working on a new one for CNN.

The problem is, though, it hasn’t added that much value to Max. WBD chair David Zaslav has admitted that sports has not been a major driver of Max sign-ups (unlike with Peacock), and Max’s failure to gain traction in the kids-and-family space has raised questions about the future of Cartoon Network more generally and led them to not only strip Max of most kids’ content in favor of continuing to license to outside streamers, but increasingly, to produce new kids’ series for those streamers as well. The rebrand back to HBO Max is effectively an admission that the one thing that actually has provided value to the service has been the sort of prestige TV and movies that have long been HBO’s bread and butter, and this split is effectively an announcement that WarnerMedia intends to focus the service on those things nigh-exclusively.

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How the NBA and Comcast Might Be About to Destroy Warner Bros. Discovery

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Over the course of just about two weeks, the reporting surrounding the NBA’s negotiations for a new TV deal has been a rollercoaster – and left me alternately supremely confused about the league’s thinking, and that of their potential partners, and worried about what will happen to the league’s longest-running partner.

Unlike the last round of NBA media rights deals, when ESPN and TNT renewed their agreements during their exclusive negotiating window, the league and their partners let the exclusive window lapse this time around – but shortly after the window expired, John Ourand reported in Puck that ESPN had “essentially come to terms” with the NBA on the league’s “A” package, which included continuing to be the exclusive home of the NBA Finals. The next day, Ourand’s former podcast partner Andrew Marchand reported in the Athletic that Amazon had reached a “framework for an agreement” that would give them a package of games as well, giving the NBA games exclusive to a streaming provider for the first time, and also that ESPN would be reducing its package of games from 100 to 80 “in one arrangement” – a surprisingly small reduction that wouldn’t be enough to remove a night of NBA games from ESPN’s schedule for an entire season.

Both of them reported that NBCUniversal remained in the running to fight with TNT over the remaining package, but the combination of the two reports seemed to suggest that NBC was a decided underdog. If ABC was going to retain all of the NBA Finals, that would remove a significant point of interest for any Comcast bid that contained a significant broadcast presence. Any continued presence of Comcast in the bidding would seem to be one that placed a high priority on games on its Peacock streaming service, with any NBC games as an added bonus along the lines of the two games NBC simulcasted with Peacock as part of the service’s “Sunday Leadoff” baseball package over the last two seasons. But now the NBA had reached a deal with Amazon, so its desire for a streaming component to its deals had already been met, and it would be a decided risk to sign a deal for games on another streaming service, one significantly smaller and more unproven than Prime Video, while abandoning a partner of such long vintage in TNT that they’d been airing games since before NBC’s previous stint with the league, one that had long attracted rave reviews for the quality of its coverage, both in-game and with its acclaimed “Inside the NBA” studio crew. Coupled with TNT’s right to match any competing offer, the chances of NBC making its triumphant return to the NBA seemed to have drastically diminished.

ESPN has a bit of a habit of rushing in early in TV negotiations and locking down enough rights to decidedly neuter the desirability of a package for a second partner and ensuring their pre-eminence within the sport. In 2012, it locked up all of their then-three Major League Baseball packages, effectively shutting Fox and NBC out of the packages that might have best boosted their respective sports networks, reducing Fox to giving FS1 Saturday games on crowded sports days with slates not worth airing on the broadcast network and a handful of weeknight games until the postseason. Then there’s ESPN’s current deal with the NHL, where ESPN picked up so much in the way of desirable rights, including ESPN’s choice of conference finals every year (in a league with a nearly two-in-three chance of at least one Canadian team reaching that round), that even with the Winter Classic and three out of seven Stanley Cup Finals still on the table as part of the B package, it was left too undesirable for anyone but TNT to take despite their lack of a broadcast network and existing commitment to AEW on Wednesday nights.

ESPN may well have seen securing all the Finals the same way. Ourand would later suggest that the NBA, famous for signing what’s widely considered the first cable-first deal for a major league when it left NBC for ESPN in 2002, now wanted the reach of a broadcast network for its “B” package. At his former employer, SportsBusiness Journal, Tom Friend reported that the NBA wanted to have ABC alternate the Finals with another partner, which ESPN fought tooth and nail until finally agreeing to pay $2.6 billion for a package with all the NBA Finals. ESPN might well have thought that by taking all the Finals, before most contenders other than TNT could even come to the table, they’d defang the one big attraction any package would have to broadcast networks and something that most would consider table stakes for any broadcast-centric package – ensuring that other than giving a handful of games to a streamer, the NBA wouldn’t have much choice but to perpetuate the status quo, helping to keep the price of all three packages down, and wouldn’t have any options other than ABC to provide that increased reach via broadcast television. That may help explain why TNT allowed their exclusive negotiating window to lapse without a deal, confident they could match any offer any other company could bring to the table dollar-for-dollar.

But both companies may have underestimated Comcast’s determination – and the result may well end up being the death warrant for all of Warner Bros. Discovery. 

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The Game to Show the Games Podcast: Episode 1 (of 1?)

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I don’t know if I’m going to do any more of these. I’m glad I did it, I’m glad I had the opportunity to do it, and I won’t rule out doing more audio stuff in the future (weird voice and all), but it took a lot out of me, chewed up most of my week, and I realized that if I were to spend more of it speaking off the cuff – even (perhaps especially) if I had a cohost – I’d probably leave a lot of dead air as I thought about what to say, which wouldn’t mesh well with the gimmick I came up with, and which would be a problem when writing a script takes almost as much effort for each topic as a full-fledged blog post would. (I mention I have a partially-written post on Pat McAfee sitting in my drafts, and I may end up publishing it largely adapted from what I say about him here.) It’s an interesting idea and I think you’ll find the result interesting as well, but I’m not sure this format is for me.

After the jump, timestamps and relevant links for each segment. 

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In the Wake of the Disney-Charter Deal, What Networks are Living on Borrowed Time?

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Last month the Walt Disney Company and Charter Communications reached a landmark carriage agreement that included Charter dropping all but three of Disney’s general entertainment networks, including networks that were still airing original programming and, in the case of FXX, pretty popular original programming at that. As I wrote earlier this week, it’s a major landmark in the linear television bundle being refocused on what linear television is good at, live events such as sports and news, with other networks serving primarily as a platform to premiere content at designated times in advance of appearing on their true streaming-service home, as well as distinct brands to organize such content, while potentially serving as a stepping stone to such streaming services becoming the true heart of the cable bundle. It’s fair to wonder what other networks could be at risk of being dropped by providers if distributors insist on similar terms from the other major programmers.

Although I made my post a month after the whole thing went down, this post is surprisingly timely: earlier this week, after I made my post, S&P Global Market Intelligence put out a report listing the networks they see as being at risk from the major programmers if they end up taking similar deals to Disney-Charter. I actually think they’re way too pessimistic about some channels, but also overlook a number of channels that would seem to be very much at risk, in my view. I’m going to make my own analysis, separate from theirs, about which networks are relatively safe and which ones are at risk. To assist in this endeavor, I’m going to refer to this table from TVNewser showing how many viewers each network averaged in total day and primetime for 2022; for numbers in the 18-49 demo, I’ll be referring to this Variety article which contains more incomplete data, and only includes the top 50 networks across broadcast and cable in primetime. 

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How Charter Took On Disney’s 800-Pound Gorilla and Won – and Redefined the Cable Bundle in the Process

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For decades, carriage disputes have been a way of life for those still immersed in the cable bundle – a source of frustration as popular networks have been held hostage in staring contests between pay TV providers and major media companies, ending, inevitably, in rates going up for all customers. But what happened for ten and a half days at the start of September was unique, indeed unprecedented, in two different ways. First, this was the first time, at least in recent memory, a carriage dispute directly affected me. Second, and far more importantly, for all that these disputes have become more contentious over the years as providers have positioned themselves as trying to hold the line on increasing programming costs and keeping customers from paying for channels they don’t want, the company more responsible for both of those things than any other – Disney, and specifically ESPN – has been largely immune to such clashes, with cable providers too fearful of the blowback from losing the 800-pound gorilla in the sports world to risk losing it even for a moment. This, though, was the first time, possibly ever, that any major cable provider was willing to lose ESPN and the other Disney networks for as long as a week. And though the sides ended up making up just hours before a highly-anticipated Monday Night Football showdown, the much-anticipated debut (and, as it turned out, possible swan song) of Aaron Rodgers with the New York Jets, in the end Charter Communications and its Spectrum-branded services managed to win some significant concessions from Disney – concessions that could ultimately define the future of the cable bundle. 

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Plotting the Future of Local Sports Distribution – By Returning to Its Past?

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When we look back, we may find that the end of the age of the regional sports network came very slowly, and then all at once.

That’s not to say that the age of the RSN is actually over, of course. Only two RSN groups are in serious trouble: Bally Sports and its parent Diamond Sports Group with its ongoing bankruptcy proceedings, and AT&T Sportsnet, which will be shut down by new parent Warner Bros. Discovery at the end of baseball season. Other RSNs and RSN groups continue to be profitable, and even within those groups there are RSNs that won’t be shut down entirely; Diamond has made payments to all but three MLB teams it has rights to for the rest of the season, and the Root Sports network in the Pacific Northwest, majority-owned by the Seattle Mariners, will not only remain extant but possibly remain operated by WBD. The problems with those two groups are that Sinclair overpaid for the former Fox Sports RSNs and didn’t have much of a plan to deal with the collapse of the cable bundle, not helped by Major League Baseball and its commissioner Rob Manfred deciding to play hardball with direct-to-consumer streaming rights, that Discovery may not have even wanted to inherit the RSNs (and for a while I wasn’t even completely certain they had) when they took WarnerMedia off of AT&T’s hands, and both of them ran into newly emboldened cable operators dropping them left and right, with RSNs all but disappearing from Dish Network and most streaming TV providers. The former Fox RSNs no longer benefitted from being lumped in with the rest of Fox’s networks, and AT&T and WBD never put any real effort into lumping their RSNs in with their national cable networks, while the move to WBD meant those RSNs were no longer co-owned with a distributor that could effectively subsidize the network. The NBC Sports RSNs have the benefit of other networks to bundle with and Comcast providing guaranteed carriage, so they’re in nowhere near as bad a shape.

And yet, should the Bally Sports networks completely collapse, the only RSN in the entire country that wouldn’t be at least partially owned by at least one of the teams it carries would be NBC Sports California in northern California – assuming that network even survives the pending move of the Oakland Athletics to Las Vegas. The Bally networks account for around half the US teams in the three major sports that provide content to RSNs, so even if its problems can be attributed to Sinclair’s mismanagement the fate of the Bally RSNs would effectively determine the fate of the RSN market as a whole, and their collapse would mark the point where it became clear that RSNs are no longer a license to print money and can only sustain themselves under specific economic circumstances, be they some combination of being owned by a team, owned by a distributor, or owned by a company able and willing to bundle them with other popular cable networks. And just because other RSNs are doing fine financially now doesn’t mean they’ll continue to be; cord-cutting is continuing apace, weakening the revenue streams for other RSNs (MSG was reportedly already flirting with bankruptcy itself this spring), and with potentially over half the teams in each league caught up in the proceedings, what they do now will help set the path for everyone else. Do they simply take over their existing RSN, or start a new one? Do the leagues take over the RSNs and use them to transition to a new streaming-focused distribution model? Or do teams and leagues rediscover a technology that’s been largely ignored for the last few decades but could be perfect for this new era? 

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What does the future of broadcast television look like?

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If there’s one tweet that sums up the conundrum broadcast television has found itself in for going on 15 years now, it’s this:


As I’ve been writing about for years, most notably in Chapter 7 of my book, this dynamic has led broadcasters to neglect their own nominal medium in the years since the dawn of the modern retransmission consent era – not merely to collect more money than they could get from advertising alone, but at least before cord-cutting caught on, as an existential lifeline allowing them to hope to compete with cable networks that could extract subscriber fees from cable operators without having their leverage undermined by the ability of people to watch their content for free. Even as cord-cutting has ramped up, the broadcast industry has remained sufficiently dependent on retransmission consent that they have not only done little to take advantage of the phenomenon, they’ve crippled any efforts to help them do so, from killing Aereo and Locast to at-best hesitantly embracing the stopgap technology allowing broadcast signals to be received by mobile devices directly.

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How Thursday Night Football on Amazon Might Be Putting the Final Nail in the Coffin of the Regional Sports Network Market

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When word came out that Amazon had guaranteed advertisers 12.5 million viewers for its new Thursday Night Football package, most observers poo-pooed the notion that they would get anything close to that and figured Amazon would find themselves in a massive financial hole trying to make up for it with very limited commercial inventory with which to do so, especially any that would be of any use for reaching Americans. As much as leagues and media companies have been rushing to jump onboard the bandwagon of streaming sports events, whenever streaming numbers for events also airing on linear networks have been publicized they’ve been a small fraction of the linear audience, and even events airing exclusively on streaming have received audiences far smaller than what their leagues are used to. Back in 2020, when Amazon aired a Niners-Cardinals game on a December Saturday – the only previous time, to my immediate recollection, that the NFL had aired a non-London game exclusively on streaming – it attracted an audience of 4.8 million, hammocked by games exclusive to NFL Network that picked up audiences of 6.1 and 8.4 million. To be sure, becoming the consistent, weekly home to Thursday Night Football, including games involving popular, valuable, relevant teams, would help Amazon achieve better ratings, but at best they would be in the neighborhood of those NFLN-exclusive games on Saturdays and Thursdays, approaching but almost certainly not passing 9 million, let alone coming close to 12.5 million; even executives within the league itself suggested the expectation shouldn’t be more than 7 or 8 million. Outside of Amazon’s own offices, the question wasn’t whether Amazon’s sky-high guarantees would turn out to be folly if not outright scamming advertisers, it was by how much.

But whatever it was Amazon did or had on its side that no one else was taking into account, be it heavily advertising TNF on anything associated with them, having an established subscriber base, or just having viewership on mobile devices count towards their Nielsen-rated numbers when it counts for no one else, it paid off, in a way that, as Amazon executives would have you think, exceeded even their own expectations. When the numbers finally came in for Amazon’s season-opening game between the Chargers and Chiefs, it clocked in at a whopping 13 million viewers – a number that included viewing on local TV stations in the teams’ respective markets, but even for the most popular teams that shouldn’t ever exceed 1.5 million for any game. (The numbers have fallen below the initial advertiser guarantees in the subsequent weeks, but have remained above 11 million.) It was a jaw-dropping number that hit the sports media Twitterverse like an atom bomb – and could turn out to be a turning point for sports on TV more generally. 

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How the Rise of Superconferences is Killing the Soul of College Football

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Thursday, June 30, 2022 may go down as the day college football as many fans knew it officially died, as that was the day the Big Ten stunned the college football world, as the addition of USC and UCLA to the conference went from being reported by various reporters, initially with the clarification that it wasn’t a done deal, to being officially announced in the space of a few hours. It’s easy to see the move as a desperation bid by the Big Ten in response to the SEC poaching Texas and Oklahoma a year earlier, which created the first sixteen-team “superconference” in college football, crippled the Big 12 and left them in a liminal state where they’re likely to be seen as only barely a power conference at best, and threatened to create a gap between the SEC and other conferences that might be insurmountable. None of the other schools in the Big 12 could bring nearly as much of a brand name or fanbase to any of the other conferences to even be worth splitting the pie more ways, let alone make up the gap to the SEC, and the Pac-12 and ACC seemed to be cohesive enough conferences, with strong relationships between their member institutions, as to be off-limits to be poached by the Big Ten or each other.

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