Comcast Agrees to Buy Time Warner Cable

Arative

Arative

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A lot of streaming sites are going towards only allowing streaming if you subscribe to a tv package. That's how they are killing cord cutting. Bandwidth caps to go after those that torrent shows and requiring those that stream to subscribe to a tv service.
 
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The Master

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Tarrant_sl said:
Wrong, by and far their most popular show was Emeril Live.



Cord cutting, while finally getting noticed a bit will ultimately be doomed if networks really want to make it so. We've already seen some studios rip away rights from Netflix and I think Netflix from a fate like that then before networks and providers totally revamp the way they do things. They money they make off Netflix is marginal compared to the current way they do things and as long as it remains that way they would just rather lop off the head of Netflix and keep printing money than have their margins threatened.
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http://www.broadcastingcable.com/new...ril-live/27988

13% fewer viewers than Good Eats. Wrong, as you put it. Good Eats, in terms of ratings and advertising dollars, is the Food Networks must successful show ever. I'm not just making things up here incidentally. So we're clear on that, I'm actually familiar with the TV industry. Networks tried to stop cord cutting, they failed. They tried to stop DVRs. They failed. They tried to stop auto-skip commercial technology in DVRs, failed there to. You're assigning them a lot more power than they actually have. If there are not legal streaming options, people will steal the material for free. Some money is better than none, last I checked. Which is why everyone is caving and streaming their shows on Hulu, their own websites, etc.
 
chaos

chaos

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The Master_sl said:
You're talking about a network whose most popular show of all time, Good Eats, barely got green lighted. Networks don't really have any incentive to care if something is popular or not, precisely because of bundling. So long as each show, individually, is making enough via advertising to justify its time slot. Which is why you'll see this slow death of shows sometimes, where it is borderline making it, so they move it to a less popular time slot and see if it has enough fans to make it work in a less popular time slot. Usually the show dies. In the case of cooking shows the production value is so low that doesn't take much to break even though. If you're only paying for the shows you want, the time slot nonsense goes away to. Another bonus.

The current industry model just isn't going to keep working as more and more people watch shows online. They'll need to do something else. Networks are already having issues with advertisers. Everyone keeps talking about money, but advertisers have been paying less for commercial space because of DVRs. Money is already becoming an issue. They'll pay more for an in-show ad, but that has the occasional backlash (see Glee at the People's Choice Awards and Digorno). There is a whole new business based around inserting background ads into old shows, every re-aired episode of I think it was CSI now has a Subway in the background somewhere. The money is already shifting around, the current model of making shows will become completely untenable in the next decade because the advertising money won't be there in the quantity it is now. Something is going to change. It is reasonable to think it'll go the same route the music industry did, instead of buying an album (channel) you buy the song (show) you want. People will come up with low cost technology to do all of this more cheaply. Location shooting is one of the primary expenses of shows and you can dispense with that entirely with modern green screen set ups (which, yes, you could set up in a garage). There are answers to the cost hurdles of "indie TV."
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Right, that is kind of my point. This is a network that doesn't like to take chances. Sure, they did once and got a hit out of it. They took similar chances on guys like Ted Allen and failed and they have since stuck to their formulaic crap. So much so that the formulaic crap has crowded out the actual cooking shows and relegated them to a whole other channel that many carrier don't even have, or if they do not in HD. Again, not an expert, but I am pretty sure that the only reason a Comcast or Verizon would carry something like the Wealth channel or Cooking channel is Disney negotiating with them to do it, leveraging their mo0re popular shit to get placement for the less popular stuff. This is the only way it works for Disney, and the only way it works for Verizon or Comcast is if they package all of those channels with a selection of more popular channels like Food Network, TNT, TBS, FX, etc and sell it to you in a bundle. It just kind of defies logic that by taking away the bundling you wouldn't lose content. The market would adjust and the industry would find a way to get those niche shows produced, maybe online or something, but the immediate impact would be networks like Cooking channel stopping production as providers no longer opted to carry channels and waste overhead on them when people aren't subscribing.
 
BrutulTM

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I think Alton was just burnt out. I could be wrong but I thought he said something on his podcast along the lines of 15 years of it or however long it was just wore him out. I don't think it was really Food Network's doing.
 
Deathwing

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Really? I swear I thought I read the opposite and that he was trying to reboot it. IDK, his tour is basically his show.
 
BrutulTM

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He's doing some short videos on Youtube that are similar to Good Eats but that's after a couple years off.

Good Eats - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

When asked about the end of the show on the August 29, 2012 episode of The Nerdist Podcast, Brown stated "I've put Good Eats into cryogenic holding. I'm not saying it's gone. I didn't shoot it in the head, I didn't kill it, but after 13 solid years of production, I needed a break."
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The Master

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Deathwing_sl said:
Really? I swear I thought I read the opposite and that he was trying to reboot it. IDK, his tour is basically his show.
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Oh no, they begged him to stay and keep doing it. Heaps of money were thrown at him. No dice. He was burnt out.

@Chaos: Yes, in the short term you're going to lose shows/channels that are essentially sucking the profits of other shows and only on the air to fill a time schedule so you have X amount of new programming every week (also a thing in the TV industry). Imagine the feedback though! Instead of a show slowly dying over a whole or half season, it'd be gone by the next episode. Networks are very slow to react and in some cases don't even listen to their viewers (Firefly being the example I am sure everyone here is familiar with). This would force that to change... or you'd quickly find yourself unprofitable.
 
BrutulTM

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Yeah, but shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad didn't really gain their following until the 2nd or 3rd season. Do you really want shows canceled after one or two bad episodes? Or one or two good episodes that nobody watched for whatever reason? Is it really such a great thing to pay $30-40 for a half dozen channels that you want vs. paying $60-$70 a month for 200 channels that include the ones you want plus a lot of other stuff that you may not know you want? I just don't see ala carte as the great thing that people seem to think it would be.
 
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The Master

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BrutulTM_sl said:
Yeah, but shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad didn't really gain their following until the 2nd or 3rd season. Do you really want shows canceled after one or two bad episodes? Or one or two good episodes that nobody watched for whatever reason? Is it really such a great thing to pay $30-40 for a half dozen channels that you want vs. paying $60-$70 a month for 200 channels that include the ones you want plus a lot of other stuff that you may not know you want? I just don't see ala carte as the great thing that people seem to think it would be.
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What? Viewership for the Mad Men premier was the highest of anything on AMC, clocking in at 1.4 million households. It went up from there. Mad Men costs between 2.5-3 million an episode. Do you think you most people would pay $2 an episode if they weren't paying for cable? Because that is break even for a show like Mad Men even for the first season, which had the lowest viewership and which is pretty much near the top for cost per episode. Breaking Bad won numerous awards for its first season, had a hugely positive New York Post review that got it a lot of viewership, etc. These are not obscure shows that took off. They were, in TV terms, blockbuster successes from day one.
 
BrutulTM

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So you're assuming that just as many people would have paid $2 per episode for a show that they had never seen as watched it for "free" since they were already paying for cable? And $2 an episode is a hell of a lot more expensive that what we had been talking about. We were talking about paying $5 a month per channel. Now it's $2 per hour of television? This is somehow superior to the current system?
 
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The Master

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BrutulTM_sl said:
So you're assuming that just as many people would have paid $2 per episode for a show that they had never seen as watched it for "free" since they were already paying for cable? And $2 an episode is a hell of a lot more expensive that what we had been talking about. We were talking about paying $5 a month per channel. Now it's $2 per hour of television? This is somehow superior to the current system?
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You mean am I assuming that the exact same thing that has happened in other markets (Music:iTunes, Games:Steam, etc) will happen? Yep. I am assuming that people pretty much behave the same in all markets of entertainment. Because that is how it has worked every time. Sure, at the end of the season it'll be a little cheaper to pick up the pack, but you miss out on the experience of watching it at the same time as everyone else, which is a big social component for a lot of people. Sounds an awful lot like people buying a new game vs people who wait for sales, doesn't it? Which has made games a lot more money then they were before. Also models like this drastically reduce piracy. People are happy to pay for things if they can get only the thing they want. It is when you try to sell them other stuff in the same package and charge them for it that they just go download your show for free.

Yes, it is superior to the current system. Reality shows would make bank, the appeal of reality TV (from the perspective of networks) is how cheap they are to make. Hundreds of thousands. And the fact they can insert advertising without annoying anyone or breaking a narrative (Top Chef sponsored by GE/Healthy Choice gets mentioned during the show all the time). You could literally charge a few cents an episode for most reality TV and be making money. So, sure, stuff like Mad Men or GoT will cost a bit to watch it as it comes out. A premium for which a number of people will happily pay. All in all if you watch a lot of TV your bill might come out the same or higher every month. For most people it'll be lower. And you'll only pay for the things you actually want.

Here's a question: Why do you think a model that has worked for a lot of entertainment markets won't work for TV? There isn't anything special about TV. The barrier to entry is it costs more. Costs which are going down every day.
 
BrutulTM

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Turns out I don't give enough of a damn to read that post. Later.
 
C

Column_sl

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Yeah, this shit is starting to get bad imho.

People will always find a way to get around stuff, but if your ISP is legally capping you then you are fucked.

I wonder if net neutrality will be one of the selling points of the next election.
 
chaos

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People still don't really understand the issue, so I doubt it. And honestly there is no net neutrality champion. That was supposed to be Obama, the guy who appointed a fucking cable industry lobbyist to the FCC director position. It's done.
 
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