Comcast announced Wednesday that it’s spinning off most of its cable TV channels into a new company, including MSNBC, CNBC, Oxygen, E! and the Golf Channel. NBC News, NBC Sports, Telemundo and Bravo, meanwhile, will stay at Comcast. As will streaming service Peacock and the company’s film and TV studios and theme parks.
This is a story about the rise of streaming and the fall of cable. And how big media companies are still trying to figure out what to do with that shift.
Just 10 years ago, Paul Verna at research firm eMarketer said his company found that four times as many households paid for cable as households that didn’t.
“By next year, those numbers will actually cross, and there will be more households in the U.S. that do not subscribe to paid TV than ones that do. So that’s, like, a massive shift,” he said.
That’s what’s driving this move by Comcast, he said. “Companies that have these cable networks, they just really don’t know what to do with them.”
Comcast is taking the spinoff approach. But why not just sell the cable channels? “I think there’s probably a lack of buyers,” said analyst Frank Louthan at Raymond James.
He said cable is still making money, but less than it used to.
“The old model where you bundle in a significant number of cable networks is going to see its end of days at some point,” he said.
But, Louthan added, it’s a different calculus for Comcast, which owns NBC’s broadcast networks and Bravo.
It has a trove of valuable shows that people want to stream: “Real Housewives,” “Top Chef,” “Law & Order” as well as the Olympics and other live sports.
“That’s a lot of content that they can get to put on Peacock, and it’s highly valued content, which is really important, which gets them more subscribers,” Louthan said.
And these days, companies have to work harder to attract and keep subscribers, said Greg Stoller at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.
“Consumers have more choices than ever,” he said.
Instead of spending a couple of hundred dollars a month on cable for a few channels they want and hundreds they don’t, he said people can spend the same, or less, on streaming and get more of what they want.
Everyone realizes that’s the future, even though so far it hasn’t been easy for companies to monetize streaming to the extent they did with cable networks in their prime, said Verna of eMarketer.
“But those challenges will eventually be worked out,” he said.
And, he said, companies are following audiences where they’re going — over to streaming.
