Next TV editor Daniel Frankel thinks he's "training" columnist David Bloom by interrupting him every 150 words.
DANIEL FRANKEL: Hello, David. A lot to get to. The big “Disney+, Hulu and Max Bundle” just launched. Comcast and Charter are watching their core business, residential internet provision, evaporate before their eyes. DirecTV told the FCC it can't keep the lights on without early cancellation fees. And Reed Hastings just made a bunch of MAGA crazies miss Stranger Things by donating $7 million to Kamala Harris’ campaign.
Just cancelled. Screw the final season of Stranger Things. I was going to cancel after it was released but frankly last season sucked anyway.July 26, 2024
Of course, the biggest news of all seems to be David Zaslav, who had all the opportunity in the world to overpay for NBA TV rights, trying to seize last minute — and through New York State Supreme Court — a rights package that looks very customized just for Amazon, right down to the international distribution component for NBA League Pass. I wrote details about Amazon's very tailored rights package in this story.
This has the look and feel of a befuddled dad who tried to convince his family they didn't, well, need Christmas … And now he's out there shopping at 11:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve because he doesn't want to sleep on the couch. Uh Zaz? You know we have Amazon for that now? Having this all descend into an ugly lawsuit reminds of that scene in the 2014 remake of the James Caan classic The Gambler, where loan shark John Goodman tells degenerate college professor Mark Wahlberg that on the trajectory they’re headed, they can no longer treat each other like they’re “gentlemen.” No, “I need us to treat each other like we’re, very very stupid,” Goodman says.
DAVID BLOOM: It’s possible, though not easy, to imagine mishandling a crucial asset for your new company in more ham-handed fashion than Zaslav has with the NBA (but the cash flow, and his bonus!). Not only did he make that dumb comment in public about maybe not needing the league, he pushed out the Warner relationship guys who’d worked for many years with the league. Then he low-balled the league in initial negotiations, and now is filing suit. Quelle stupide!
Turns out, the NBA isn’t just another unscripted reality show contestant you can intimidate with a cease-and-desist order. The lawsuit Turner Sports filed feels mostly like an attempt to shake down the NBA for some lovely parting gifts like a couple of hundred million dollars in “wind-down fees,” or "retention bonuses" or something.
Read WBD's lawsuit against the NBA here:
I had a breakfast meeting today with a guy who’s worked with the league, several networks and studios and a bunch of other media organizations on the business and creative sides.
He doesn’t believe the NBA will end up paying anything. As you note, the Amazon package was custom-built for Amazon, which WBD can’t come close to “matching.” Amazon has somewhere north of 200 million global customers on streaming, that vast online store, the third-largest ad network in the world, and the biggest cloud-computing operation in the universe. Combine what’s left of the tattered TNT cable audience and the smallish (I think it’s around 40 million) streaming audience of Max and Zaz. Isn’t. Close. Of note: the $77 billion in new NBA deals do not include matching provisions anymore, so the league won’t have to worry about this happening again in 11 years.
Meanwhile, we’ll see if that Disney Plus/Hulu tie-up with Max makes any difference. It certainly may reduce churn a bit, which is good. But if Max has less and less programming that someone will pay for, will a bundle be much of an enticement?
What now does WBD bring to the Venu sports-focused skinny bundle? Do the other Venu partners ponder dropping it for Comcast/Peacock, which is looking like a pretty beefy bird all of a sudden? The other big question is, what next Charles Barkley? The Athletic quoted the Chuckster saying he’d consider deals with any of the three winning bidders if WBD doesn’t honor the rest of his 10-year, $210 million contract, now in its third year. As he rightly said: “The NBA clearly wanted to break up with us. I don’t want to be in a relationship where I have to sue somebody to be in it. That makes zero sense. If you have to sue somebody to stay in a relationship, do you think that is a healthy relationship?”
FRANKEL: I honestly don't know where Sir Charles goes these days in media to live a life of purity from litigation. I mean Disney and its Venu friends have their own legal problems — it doesn’t look like Fubo's lawsuit against the joint venture is going anywhere, based on this reporting Friday by Daniel Kaplan:
A federal court judge ordered Disney, Fox and WBD to turn over all documents related to their Venu joint venture that pre-date the Feb 6 announcement. They could thus ultimately come into public view. Fubo is suing the trio for antitrust violationsJuly 26, 2024
News-wise, this week was the most engaged I've been at my job in months. And our “users” were engaged with our “content,” too. I wrote about DirecTV warning the FCC that if it bans pay TV operators from collecting early cancellation fees, they'll just charge folks the same money upfront. That generated our biggest audience of 2024. Friday night, after some sushi rolls and spicy pork ramen at Sake House Miro on La Brea and 8th -- stay for the "Yellowtail Truffle Roll" but bail on the $16.50 valet parking -- I unwound from it all by settling into part 1 of the HBO documentary Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose on Max. This four-part sports documentary is off to a heck of a start.
Rose, 83, and banned from any kind of participation from Major League Baseball since 1989 because he bet on its games, is given every opportunity to acquit himself. But he just digs in deeper. It opens with Rose, interviewed in the run-up to the 2022 Super Bowl, discussing his local Cincinnati sports persona similarities with Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow. The maudlin moment quickly hits a brick wall when Rose confesses he's bet on the Los Angeles Rams. Wait, what? He seems to be a man whose perspective on life — and specifically, his demanding father — never has evolved since his 18th birthday. And at least one episode in, the viewer comes away not at all sure Rose understands the wrongness of what he did. If you want insight into why baseball — 35 years after the ban and the very-soon-after death of the man who instituted it, Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti — hasn’t lifted its draconian dissonance for a player who once flew around the base paths like Superman, and who compiled perhaps the game's most staggering collection of stats over a 23-year-career, this HBO documentary seems to be on the road to making us understand.
BLOOM: The terms “Charles Barkley” and “purity” are not often conjoined in a single sentence, except perhaps in opposition. That being said, no surprise the Fubo suit is proceeding apace. As you’ve previously intimated after conversations with Fubo’s CEO, there’s certainly enough collusive smoke wafting about for any reasonable judge to allow the case to proceed to another level. The judge channeled the iconic Curtis Mayfield in ruling, “Move On Up.”
Alongside the NBA rights decision’s impacts on WBD, this potentially very expensive Fubo suit feels like a lot of headaches for a still-not-launched project announced sans details by Bob Iger deep in the middle of last winter’s proxy battle against Trian Partners. The Venu news then helped boost Disney share prices north of $123 by late March. Since then, we and most of the other outlets following the media business have understandably been absorbed by the Paramount and WBD/NBA soap operas. But at the same time, those Disney shares have fallen again, to south of $90.
That’s a 27.6% decline in four months, a near-Zaslavian achievement (WBD’s shares are now close to $8, from a $24 debut price in 2022). The Disney share price Friday is $2 less than it was on Jan. 1. And that’s on a Silicon Valley-worthy price-to-earnings ratio of nearly 100. Talk about a sequel! Does Bob Iger still have what it takes to fix Disney? Or is Wall Street missing something? The Venu birthing pains, and the whisper-quiet debut of the new Disney bundle with Max, don’t seem promising. On the flip side, Pixar and Marvel both look to be back on the good foot with the massive success of Inside Out 2 (a record $1.466 billion in global box office) and similarly massive success of Deadpool & Wolverine, out this weekend to strong reviews and relentless marketing/cross-promotion (update, it’s the eighth-biggest debut ever, at $211.1 million and counting). The Heinz co-promotion with D&W is sharp like a kaitana. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
But given that one aging and powerful man with lots of past achievements has stepped aside this month, it’s perhaps worth asking whether Bob Iger should do the same? Is he up to the task of fixing all the problems he’s identified at Disney? Is Iger inviting another visit from Nelson Peltz and Ike Perlmutter? Iger and wife Willow Bay, the dean of USC’s journalism and communications school, this month bought the women’s professional soccer team, Angel City FC, for a league-record $250 million. While they may bring stability to a chaotic ownership situation there, is Iger keeping his eye on the ball that matters, i.e., not that one on the football pitch? Seems ill-timed if nothing else, given the stock swoon. What say you?
FRANKEL: Unfortunately — or more likely for Bob Iger, fortunately — I don’t have bandwidth to get into his personal finance. I can say mine is a little nuts with household creation right now. Among other things, I'm trying to set my two sons up at their respective college-situated apartments with high-speed internet. Dealing with Cox Communications for 200 Mbps in Santa Barbara, I've quickly come to understand why fixed wireless access is embraced by so many consumers right now — Verizon said last week 5G Home Internet added 378,000 more customers in the second quarter.
Reece and another freshman teammate are on the first floor of a two-story apartment, and the landlord isn’t too keen on satellite appliances being installed on the roof — which is probably fine, since satellite-based ISPs Viasat and HughesNet scored so poorly in Consumer Reports’ latest survey of 48,000 broadband-using customers, which we also reported on this past busy week. Consumer Reports said fiber had the highest overall satisfaction rating, but there doesn't appear to be a fiber option in “The Mesa,” Reece’s new neighborhood.
If my son and his roomie, both active users of MLB: The Show and whatever version of Madden is the latest one, want to avoid Cox's 1.25 terabyte usage cap, they've got to pay an extra $50 on top of the $70 price for a 200 Mbps connection. There's a bundling discount if I sign the boy up for Cox Mobile … but Reece and the fam are already tied up (not so happily) with Spectrum Mobile here at the ol’ crib in L.A. So, we’re giving T-Mobile 5G FWA a test whirl … which they allow you to do for 14 days, money back if things don't work out. I’ve heard all sorts of inconsistent things about fixed wireless. But for $50 a month vs. $120 a month for cable internet that also has performance baggage, it's worth a try. I know the collapse of the Affordable Connectivity Program and fiber competition also factor into it, but it makes me understand why Comcast and Charter are suddenly bleeding out high-speed internet customers.
BLOOM: It’s always fun to watch someone (else) be a test bed for complicated issues such as home connectivity for gamers (a very large community of which I include myself). Fixed Wireless is one of those technologies with so much promise, and so much “yeah, but.” If you don’t have a clear view to a nearby wireless access point, your connection speeds may be seriously impaired, without reducing the price you pay. I’m “fixed" on both broadband cable’s "negative growth” and fixed wireless’ flattened growth curve in your graphics. Who’s buying these days? Are we hitting saturation, especially at prices like these? You got a crummy “deal,” which suggests there aren’t nearly enough choices in your son’s college town to generate a competitive price. I predict your stomach lining will continue to be endangered as you try to fix the unfixable headaches of fixed wireless.
I don’t want to lose track of our conversation about bundles. I wonder if they’re truly worth it, at least as constituted. I was on a Future of TV Live online panel this week with organizer Brian Ring and Needham senior analyst Laura Martin, among others. Martin said bundles are a “win-win-win” for everyone. But she acknowledged giving consumers more content they can’t easily search or surface isn’t a win, even at a reduced price. Yeah, the streaming companies reduce churn, but not customer annoyances. Venu and the new Disney-Max bundle aren’t (yet) fixing this. I expect uptake will be modest. Martin cited a particularly ugly number from Samsung: consumers typically take between five and 11 minutes to actually find something to watch. I’m feeling like Bonnie Tyler, holding out for a hero (and no, not really finding one). No wonder everyone’s losing money.
Speaking of consumer disappointments, Alphabet reported solid quarterly earnings again this week, but one surprising soft spot was YouTube. Turns out it’s being hit like all the other ad-supported platforms by Amazon’s sudden conversion of a couple of hundred million subscribers to its ad-supported tier.
Also read: YouTube Ad Revenue Up 13% to $8.66 Billion in Q2
That sudden deluge of Amazon ad impressions is whacking Netflix, too, but because so much less Netflix viewership is ad-supported, for now, it’s less vulnerable than YouTube, all the FASTs, and the smaller subscription streamers hoping ad-supported tiers will rescue their bottom lines. How much longer can Paramount Plus, Max, Peacock, maybe even Disney and Hulu remain independent? Are they holding out for an increasingly unlikely Trump administration to rescue them by allowing rampant mergers and buyouts? Holding out for a hero indeed.
FRANKEL: Ah, that “Trump administration.” Likely? Unlikely? I have to pinch myself back into talking about sports documentaries and football club purchases. Perhaps it was JD Vance's resurfaced comments about “childless cat ladies” sending a friend of mine, for whom in vitro fertilization didn't work, into a depression spiral this past week … that also sent me into a binge of a seven-year-old Hulu series I had yet to see, The Handmaid's Tale. “I was asleep before. That’s how we let it happen,” says Elizabeth Moss’ protagonist in the pilot. When a candidate blithely tells everyone he plans on taking away free elections, and we’re talking about other things … it does feel like we're all sleepwalking into something.
A badly trained manager at my last employer once told me — actually, she yelled it — to keep my leftist politics out of my work. I'm covering the cable industry, she (loudly) reminded me. It leans right (probably true). “These are your people!” she said ... er, screamed. (I was told by her successor, also badly trained, that she prided herself on her frequently caustic emails, which she called “nastygrams.” Fierce bunch, they were.) Over time, as a middle-aged, white-male property owner living in an inner-city Los Angeles neighborhood under the auspices of District Attorney George Gascón, I've moved, inexorably, to the center. It just happened. While I was sleeping. I don't receive as many “nastygrams” these days from aggrieved cable-industry executives about my political views. Perhaps with the former president from the campaign trail loudly calling one of the most respected leaders in TMT, Brian Roberts, a “slimeball,” our readers have moved a little more towards the center, too. So I will say, to “my people,” that in around 98 days, we could be voting for the very last time. Believe Donald J. Trump about not many things, but trust him when he says it's gonna get it "fixed." I’m not worried about nastygrams from any of you anymore. I'm worried, legitimately, about black vans showing up at my duplex to take me away. Maybe you’ve thought long and hard about this very bad autocratic idea. And maybe, somehow, you're ready, after 248 years, to try something very different. Perhaps, somehow, you think the shockingly retrograde Project 2025 is “fire,” and that everyone will just peacefully settle into it. Just like they will this whole “dictator for a couple of days” thing. For the rest of us — the most of us — let’s not be asleep when this very radical and dangerous transition happens.
