CFB Analyst
Posted 26 November 2015 - 11:48 AM
CNN Money: Disney's cable channels lose millions of subscribers
ESPN, its most profitable channel, has lost 7 million subscribers since 2013. ESPN now has 92 million subscribers, according to a regulatory filing posted late Wednesday.
7 million x $6/mo subscription fee x 12 months = OUCH (or, $504 million in annual revenue lost over the past 2 years)
Clever move by Disney to post that info at the end of the day before Thanksgiving though.
HOF
Posted 26 November 2015 - 02:03 PM
CNN Money: Disney's cable channels lose millions of subscribers
7 million x $6/mo subscription fee x 12 months = OUCH (or, $504 million in annual revenue lost over the past 2 years)
Clever move by Disney to post that info at the end of the day before Thanksgiving though.
Sweet sassy molassy.
HOF
Posted 30 November 2015 - 11:17 AM
At 93M subscribers they're still doing well. At 80M subscribers, they'll feel a pinch. At 60M, they'll be pretty much bankrupt.
Fair-weather ex-diehard
Posted 30 November 2015 - 11:22 AM
At 93M subscribers they're still doing well. At 80M subscribers, they'll feel a pinch. At 60M, they'll be pretty much bankrupt.
Well, the shift appears to be away from relying on cable cash and towards making money from content... and they've still got content and they're in the business of making more. The transition will be a rough ride, but they could still come out the other end being in as good a shape as anybody and better than most....
"The only change is that baseball has turned Paige from a second-class citizen to a second-class immortal." - Satchel Paige
CFB Analyst
Posted 30 November 2015 - 11:28 AM
Well, the shift appears to be away from relying on cable cash and towards making money from content... and they've still got content and they're in the business of making more. The transition will be a rough ride, but they could still come out the other end being in as good a shape as anybody and better than most....
With the cost of that content soaring though, it could be a very rough ride.
HOF
Posted 30 November 2015 - 12:46 PM
Well, the shift appears to be away from relying on cable cash and towards making money from content... and they've still got content and they're in the business of making more. The transition will be a rough ride, but they could still come out the other end being in as good a shape as anybody and better than most....
That's the question. Is their content good enough to support them going to a model where people will pay $20 a month for ESPN as a standalone product? They'd need at least 25 million subscribers.
Fair-weather ex-diehard
Posted 30 November 2015 - 12:50 PM
With the cost of that content soaring though, it could be a very rough ride.
That's the question. Is their content good enough to support them going to a model where people will pay $20 a month for ESPN as a standalone product? They'd need at least 25 million subscribers.
I think of ESPN as being just one cog in the Disney content-machine...
"The only change is that baseball has turned Paige from a second-class citizen to a second-class immortal." - Satchel Paige
CFB Analyst
Posted 30 November 2015 - 01:15 PM
I think of ESPN as being just one cog in the Disney content-machine...
It is a very big cog though. The ESPN news sent Disney's stock down by 3% Friday, despite the fact they did the news dump after the markets closed the day before Thanksgiving. Investors are getting nervous over these trends, despite the fact that Disney's non-TV properties are probably doing well, and certainly stand to get a big boost shortly with the release of The Force Awakens.
Fair-weather ex-diehard
Posted 30 November 2015 - 01:26 PM
It is a very big cog though. The ESPN news sent Disney's stock down by 3% Friday, despite the fact they did the news dump after the markets closed the day before Thanksgiving. Investors are getting nervous over these trends, despite the fact that Disney's non-TV properties are probably doing well, and certainly stand to get a big boost shortly with the release of The Force Awakens.
But you gotta remember that ever since top capital gains got cut way below 50% (which caused sound judgment to be replaced by flipping and short-term thinking), the stock market knee-jerks like crazy, based on not much... hell, a company gets clobbered if they beat their own estimates by a lot but fall short of what some hedge guy arbitrarily decided.. and they've got the knee-jerks computerized, which means they happen even faster... it's like epileptic fits, but with dollars instead of the nervous system...
You gotta look deeper to see how it fits into the mega-content-machine...
"The only change is that baseball has turned Paige from a second-class citizen to a second-class immortal." - Satchel Paige
CFB Analyst
Posted 30 November 2015 - 01:32 PM
But you gotta remember that ever since top capital gains got cut way below 50% (which caused sound judgment to be replaced by flipping and short-term thinking), the stock market knee-jerks like crazy, based on not much... hell, a company gets clobbered if they beat their own estimates by a lot but fall short of what some hedge guy arbitrarily decided.. and they've got the knee-jerks computerized, which means they happen even faster... it's like epileptic fits, but with dollars instead of the nervous system...
You gotta look deeper to see how it fits into the mega-content-machine...
Big-time investors today definitely have a very short-term perspective. But the C-level types of every company still have to keep them happy first and foremost, sometimes at the expense of potential future gains. That's why ESPN slashed a whole bunch of employees recently, including several big-name talents.
Fair-weather ex-diehard
Posted 30 November 2015 - 02:12 PM
Big-time investors today definitely have a very short-term perspective. But the C-level types of every company still have to keep them happy first and foremost, sometimes at the expense of potential future gains. That's why ESPN slashed a whole bunch of employees recently, including several big-name talents.
Yep... it's a destructive way to do things... but it's what's been happening for a while now... the fix is simple: put top capital gains back up where they belong and tax the hell out of computerized flipping... do that, and Wall St would once again care about companies being solid instead of demanding they disembowel themselves to reach a quarterly number...
"The only change is that baseball has turned Paige from a second-class citizen to a second-class immortal." - Satchel Paige
MVP
Posted 18 January 2016 - 08:41 AM
Most Cable Subscribers Would Dump ESPN to Save $8 a Month
Pay-TV bundles that charge their customers for channels they never watch has long been one reason people say they hate their cable companies. Now a new survey says that more than half of cable customers would give up ESPN—the single biggest programming cost on a cable bill—if they could save $8 each month.
The new study was conducted by a polling company called Civic Science, and described in a blog post by BTIG Research. Fifty-six percent of the respondents said they'd give up ESPN and ESPN2 to save money. The numbers varied by gender: Sixty percent of women were ready to pull the plug on the sports network, while the number among men was just 49 percent. The survey covered 1,582 consumers, of whom 87 percent currently subscribe to a multichannel pay TV service.
Cable industry sources have long ball-parked that it would cost as much as $30 a month to get ESPN by itself if it ever became untethered from a pay TV bundle. In what is surely a bad sign for the company and its parent Disney, only 6 percent of the respondents said they'd pay even $20 a month for ESPN as a standalone channel. Last summer, the company reported it had lost about 7 million subscribers over the last two years.
http://www.consumerr...save--8-a-month
John Keegan, a renowned British military historian, has called World War II the greatest single event in the history of mankind. - Tom Brokaw, NBC special correspondent and author of "The Greatest Generation"
CFB Analyst
Posted 18 January 2016 - 09:34 PM
Most Cable Subscribers Would Dump ESPN to Save $8 a Month
Out of that 56%, how many of them don't care about having any sports channels at all? Because if that's the case they really don't need cable/satellite. You can find just about everything in a cheap streaming package....throw in an antenna and you get a bunch of other OTA channels free. Almost no reason at all to have cable TV if you never watch sports.
MVP
Posted 19 January 2016 - 02:44 AM
Out of that 56%, how many of them don't care about having any sports channels at all? Because if that's the case they really don't need cable/satellite. You can find just about everything in a cheap streaming package....throw in an antenna and you get a bunch of other OTA channels free. Almost no reason at all to have cable TV if you never watch sports.
I agree, nowadays it's alot easier to make the switch and many are doing it as evidence simply by the numbers being reported in that ESPN subscribers are down 7 million over the last 2 years. And I'm one of them as I've been cable/sat free for over 2 years now and dumped it because I was only watching about 5-6 shows that were on cable TV specific and not a ESPN got have it in my life. I was lucky in making the switch, because at one time in life I had installed cable TV, OTA antennas and dealt with building PC computers since the days of MS-DOS. So I was tech savvy enough to make the switch.
And the discovering Plex streaming software was greatly helpful too.
John Keegan, a renowned British military historian, has called World War II the greatest single event in the history of mankind. - Tom Brokaw, NBC special correspondent and author of "The Greatest Generation"
Fair-weather ex-diehard
Posted 19 January 2016 - 03:55 AM
I agree, nowadays it's alot easier to make the switch and many are doing it as evidence simply by the numbers being reported in that ESPN subscribers are down 7 million over the last 2 years. And I'm one of them as I've been cable/sat free for over 2 years now and dumped it because I was only watching about 5-6 shows that were on cable TV specific and not a ESPN got have it in my life. I was lucky in making the switch, because at one time in life I had installed cable TV, OTA antennas and dealt with building PC computers since the days of MS-DOS. So I was tech savvy enough to make the switch.
And the discovering Plex streaming software was greatly helpful too.
Plex is way better than I expected it to be... it's like software should be...
"The only change is that baseball has turned Paige from a second-class citizen to a second-class immortal." - Satchel Paige
CFB Analyst
Posted 21 January 2016 - 02:11 AM
Forbes: While ESPN Slowly Sinks, So Far It Ignores Apple's Lifeline
Despite [CEO John] Skipper’s brave face, ESPN has tremendous challenges ahead. It has fixed-cost deals for all the sports it buys, most notably the NFL ($1.9B annually), NBA ($1.4B) and MLB ($700M). While it collects about $8 per month per month per household that does subscribe to its package of networks, every million people that stop doing so cost it around $100 million annually. The real threat is that this becomes a sort of death spiral where the company tries to collect more money from those that remain encouraging them, too, to get rid of ESPN as the price rises higher. That would then lead to more cancellations, more price increases, and so on.
Fair-weather ex-diehard
Posted 28 January 2016 - 02:41 AM
"The only change is that baseball has turned Paige from a second-class citizen to a second-class immortal." - Satchel Paige
MVP
Posted 29 January 2016 - 10:43 AM
Doctor Who fans already began panicking earlier this month when Netflix announced that the series would leave its subscription service.
However, U.K. fans got a reprieve, with Netflix keeping the popular science fiction show about a time traveling alien in that country. And at the time of the announcement, U.S. fans made plans to subscribe to Hulu to continue watching the series.
Unfortunately, there's more bad news for U.S. Who fans: the series will also leave Hulu as of next month, leaving that country's fans completely in the dark: there will be no Doctor Who streaming anywhere in the country as of Feb. 1.
However, the BBC definitely has something up its sleeve.
"A BBC spokesperson told us that American Whovians will still be able to stream seasons 7 - 9 on BBCAmerica.com and that the series will still be available through Amazon Video, iTunes, Google Play, and more VOD platforms," wrote Decider. "However they added: 'We hope to announce a new digital partner for Doctor Who shortly.' "
http://www.techtimes...-next-month.htm
John Keegan, a renowned British military historian, has called World War II the greatest single event in the history of mankind. - Tom Brokaw, NBC special correspondent and author of "The Greatest Generation"
MVP
Posted 03 February 2016 - 04:01 PM
If true, stopping next day streaming. You will see a very big decrease in subscibership.
The one advantage Hulu has over the majority of its streaming competitors is the offer of next-day streaming for certain programming. That may be going away, however, according to a new report out of the Wall Street Journal.
Time Warner is reportedly looking to buy 25 percent of Hulu's stock in an attempt to prevent the service from being able to stream current seasons of network and premium television. The company is concerned that having access to next-day streaming will only accelerate cord-cutting across the country.
http://www.polygon.c...t-day-streaming
John Keegan, a renowned British military historian, has called World War II the greatest single event in the history of mankind. - Tom Brokaw, NBC special correspondent and author of "The Greatest Generation"
CFB Analyst
Posted 03 February 2016 - 04:32 PM
So Time Warner wants to invest in Hulu, just to remove the biggest advantage it offers over Netflix, et al? Well, that would be a plus for Netflix, as it would level the field as far as when new programming is available to customers. I don't see how this benefits Time Warner though.
When new technology presents new opportunities, it is usually best to invest resources into adapting your business model to take advantage of it, rather than investing in trying to stop it. The recording industry learned that lesson the hard way.
0 members, 0 guests, 0 anonymous users
