The world’s largest traditional entertainment companies face a reckoning in 2024 after losing more than $5 billion in the past year from the streaming services they built to compete with Netflix.
Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Comcast and Paramount—US entertainment conglomerates that have been growing ever larger for decades—are facing pressure to shrink or sell legacy businesses, scale back production and slash costs following billions in losses from their digital platforms.
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“TV advertising is falling far short, cord-cutting is continuing to accelerate, sports costs are going up and the movie business is not performing,” he said. “Everything is going wrong that can go wrong. The only thing [the companies] know how to do to survive is try to merge and cut costs.”
I hated cable/sat TV for this packaging but now with over 15 years since I cut the cord I wonder if they had the technology back then to piece meal out the channels to every single subscriber?
I’m not letting them off the hook for purposely packaging 1 good channel with 5 turd channels and then repeating this with the remaining good channels but I do wonder if there were any technical limits to how the channels were sold?
No
Absolutely not, they bundled because they knew no one would subscribe to certain channels individually. That and a combination of licensing deals. They could just have easily sold each channel a la cart.
The tech behind cable was the same RF signals as OTA, just pumped through a network of coax (and the days it’s digital over hybrid fiber coax via DOCSIS). Channels are encrypted at the headend and decrypted by your set top box, which is programmed from the mothership to know which channels you do or don’t subscribe to. They could have easily sold each channel on its own, but the media companies who own the content know no one is going to subscribe to the turd channels, so they bundle them with the most popular ones to ensure they’ll at least be scrolled through, all so that they can sell the space to advertisers.