A couple of years ago, I recall Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav talking about the company’s linear networks and he said something along the lines of “The Food Network is producing around 500 hours of original shows a year. I think we can cut that in half and no one will notice.
Spoiler: they did.
If you still have a cable bundle, you’re painfully familiar with the state of most cable network schedules. 90% reruns and many of those reruns air across multiple networks.
I had been thinking about that situation recently and decided to see if it was possible to identify a cable network simply by listing a few of the shows that are airing over the next 48 hours.
The results are below.
Can You Identify These Cable Channels By Their Schedules?
Everyone in the television industry is well aware that subscribers have been fleeing the traditional cable bundle for more than ten years. And that is a huge problem for the media companies who own those cable networks, because the cable bundle throws off more revenue than any other part of the television business.
A combination of fees from the Live TV platforms and services (which pay a flat rate per subscriber, the amount depending on the cable network) and advertising revenue has been providing the money to keep the rest of these media companies revenue positive while they have been stumbling around looking for a profitable digital business model.
Faced with an ever smaller, yet still incredibly popular cable bundle, large media companies had two choices. Continue to invest in original programming to keep the retransmission fees as high as possible, while using that steady stream of new programs to help populate their streaming services. And perhaps even lighten the ad load a bit, to make the linear networks more competitive with streaming services and FAST channels.
Yes, that means making less money in the short and perhaps even mid-term. But in the end, you end up with a viable business that will be smaller, yet still profitable.
Instead, companies such as Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery have decided to strip mine their cable networks in an effort to extract as much revenue as possible before the remaining customers walk away in disgust. They have cut their original programming budgets down to a small fraction of what they were spending even five years, creating a collection of zombie cable networks that air nothing but tired reruns and a few higher profile networks that air just enough original programming to keep some percentage of the existing audience from dropping their cable bundle.
The end result is that much of your cable network lineup is filled with branding exercises: familiar sounding channels that air programming that is no different than what you find on a number of other identical zombie channels.
And to prove my point, let’s play a game of “Identify the Cable Channel By It’s Programming.” Here are lists of some of the programming you’ll find on familiar cable channels over the next 48 hours. See if you can figure out which channels they are and I’ll have the answers at the bottom of the newsletter:
1) Auction Hunters, The Wayans Brothers, The Jamie Fox Show, The Hills
2) NCIS, The A Team, Law & Order, Magnum P.I. and Sanford & Son
3) FBI, NCIS New Orleans, Scorpion, Law & Order
4) The Drew Barrymore Show, The Golden Girls, Gunsmoke, and Everybody Loves Raymond
5) The Goonies, Tommy Boy, Inside Edition, F9: The Fast Saga
6) Paranormal Nightshift, Destination Fear and Portals To Hell
7) Law & Order, Bones, and Beverly Hills Cop 2
8) The Golden Girls, Roseanne, Mama’s Family and The King Of Queens
9) House Hunters, Beachfront Bargain Hunt, Island Hunters, and Food Paradise
10) Everybody Loves Raymond, Sanford & Son, Two And Half Men, and Night Court
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Scott Pelley On His Final Days At ‘60 Minutes’
The NY Times posted an extensive interview with former 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley on Sunday, and it’s a good read. Although I wish the NY Times would take the lead of some broadcast and streaming news outlets and post the entire raw interview transcript.
Amazingly, Pelley claims he had no idea that he confrontation with new 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton would lead to him being fired. But I wanted to highlight this portion, where he provided more details about a situation in which he felt Bari Weiss wanted him to change his story before it was broadcast:
You’ve now accused Weiss of injecting “falsehoods and bias” into at least one of your politically sensitive stories. What did she specifically ask for? What story? That’s February, and my team and I are doing a story about the protests in Minneapolis against the ICE crackdown there. We’ve interviewed Senator Rand Paul, Republican, because he’s going to hold hearings into this, and the fact that a Republican was going to do that was quite newsworthy. So, we interviewed Senator Paul and then built out a story about what had happened — the killing of Renee Good, the killing of Alex Pretti, the protests. I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively. We found a picture of a protester chest-bumping an officer. We found a picture of an officer being hit in the head with a snowball. We culled together a lot of video of protesters screaming in the faces of officers because we were going to talk about the killing of Pretti and the killing of Good, and it seemed to me important to tell the audience about the entire context. I thought we’d done a really good job with this. We also included a picture of Alex Pretti before he was killed kicking out a taillight on a police car and made a point of saying, this is Alex Pretti and this is what he did.
So, the story goes through screenings. It’s very well received. There are notes as always and we do rewrites as always. But this is on a very tight deadline. It’s Sunday; we’re going on the air that night. And in the case of stories that are, as we say, crashing, our deadline on Sunday is noon. So, we work on all of these things. We get the piece approved by everyone. And about four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.
This is not what you see on the video. On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.
We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.
Tweet Of The Day
Chart Of The Day
I thought this breakdown of streaming profits from Media and Entertainment Consulting firm Owl & Co. was quite fascinating:
The Answers
1) Auction Hunters, The Wayans Brothers, The Jamie Fox Show, The Hills - (MTV2)
2) NCIS, The A Team, Law & Order, Magnum P.I. and Sanford & Son - (Sundance TV)
3) FBI, NCIS New Orleans, Scorpion, Law & Order - (Pop TV)
4) The Drew Barrymore Show, The Golden Girls, Gunsmoke, and Everybody Loves Raymond - (TV Land)
5) The Goonies, Tommy Boy, Inside Edition, F9: The Fast Saga - (Paramount Network)
6) Paranormal Nightshift, Destination Fear and Portals To Hell - (Travel)
7) Law & Order, Bones, and Beverly Hills Cop 2 - (BBC America)
8) The Golden Girls, Roseanne, Mama’s Family and The King Of Queens - (CMT)
9) House Hunters, Beachfront Bargain Hunt, Island Hunters, and Food Paradise - (Destination America)
10) Everybody Loves Raymond, Sanford & Son, Two And Half Men, and Night Court (IFC)
What’s Coming Tonight And Tomorrow
MONDAY, JUNE 8TH:
Alice And Steve Series Premiere (Hulu)
American Ninja Warrior Season Premiere (NBC)
Below Deck Mediterranean Season Premiere (Bravo)
Crashers Series Premiere (HGTV)
Gamechangers: The Ashlyn Harris Story (The Roku Channel)
TUESDAY, JUNE 9TH:
Beyond Paradise Season Premiere (BritBox)
Dragon Striker Series Premiere (Disney XD)
Norway: The Dark Horse (Netflix)
Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Runway Show (Hulu)
The Rest Is Football Series Premiere (Netflix)