Wall Street Journal (April 29)
The cable industry is “panicked over the looming breakup of its business model” as fewer traditional linear customers want big bundles and younger viewers increasingly opt for video on demand subscriptions. Cable operators benefitted from local monopolies that allowed them to “dictate packages and pricing, markets be damned.” Though “cable bills have grown at almost triple the rate of inflation over the past two decades,” the gravy train may be coming to an end.
Tags: Cable, Customers, Inflation, Markets, Monopolies, Packages, Pricing, Video on demand, Viewers
Washington Post (February 14, 2014)
Russia’s refreshingly independent TV Dozhd may soon be off the air as cable and satellite providers, apparently under duress, drop the channel from their offerings. “This knives-in-the-night approach is typical of the latter-day Putin regime. While Mr. Putin once caused a stir with a highly publicized takeover of the independent TV channel NTV, now he is stealthier, working his will from the shadows…. But the result is the same: It looks like yet another light in Russia’s democratic struggle—the refreshing openness of TV Dozhd—is about to go dark.”
Tags: Cable, Democratic struggle, Duress, Independent, Openness, Putin, Regime, Russia, Satellite, Stealth, Takeover, TV, TV Dozhd
The Economist (August 17)
“The web is beginning to fit into the media world’s oldest script: a new technology rides into town, the moguls try to destroy it, but it survives and becomes part of the town’s future. Hollywood loathed the VCR (comparing it to the Boston Strangler); the networks hated cable TV; sheet-music publishers feared the phonograph…. Yet nearly always two things happen: the old media survive (people are still buying vinyl records and even the odd printed magazine), and the new media expand the market.”
Tags: Cable, Hollywood, Magazine, Market, Music, Networks, New media, Old media, Phonograph, Print, Publishers, Records, Technology, TV, VCR, Vinyl, Web
Wall Street Journal (December 29)
“The fiscal-cliff melodrama has become one of those bad cable reality shows, a sort of “Real Housewives of New Jersey” without the sincerity though not without the plastic surgery. In the latest episode on Friday, the actors met at the White House in a last-ditch attempt to avert the cliff they had created, and that they all claim would be a catastrophe to jump off, but that they hope they can blame on each other if they do.”
Tags: Cable, Congress, Fiscal cliff, Melodrama, Reality shows, U.S., White House
