Disney Fight Marks Cable TV’s Last Stand
The endgame for cable TV has arrived. The decadeslong alliance between programmers and distributors that has been the foundation of the roughly $200 billion TV industry is starting to crumble as each side looks to protect its interests in a media landscape centered on streaming. Those tensions have burst into the open with a fight between Disney and the nation’s No.
2 pay-TV provider, Charter Communications. The feud has left some 15 million customers of Charter’s Spectrum cable service without access to Disney’s ESPN and other channels, with Charter hinting it may exit the pay-TV business altogether. Meanwhile, consumers are abandoning cable TV at an accelerated pace.
Big entertainment companies such as Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global are making it even more enticing to cut the cord by putting some of their highest value cable content—news and sports—into streaming services that compete with cable TV. The entertainment companies are striking a delicate balance.
They need to make sure the legacy cable-TV industry survives. It is providing the profits to support their streaming apps, which are seen as the future but are losing billions of dollars a year, collectively. Distributors such as Charter see the world differently.
Cable TV doesn’t make much money for them anymore. Some smaller cable providers have already stopped offering TV bundles to their broadband subscribers, referring them instead to internet-TV providers such as Google’s YouTube TV. Top pay-TV executives say their companies are effectively subsidizing a new business, streaming, that is eating cable TV.
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