Should We Care About the (now resolved) Time Warner – Fox Dispute?- updated
Two greedy titans of the producing world battling over subscriber fees? At first glance it seems like a yawn, if another unfortunate bit of fallout from media consolidation.
But it does have some interesting implications for performers.
In old time mob terms, Fox is trying to muscle in on the cable operators’ subscriber fee racket. Why? Because that’s where the money is.
This time it’s Time Warner. But it could be any cable or satellite company. Whether or not you ever watch a minute of their programming, every subscriber to Time Warner or any other distributor is paying a monthly fee to every single one of the cable nets.
The only group not cut in on the money is over the air broadcasters. The reason is that in the old days, broadcasters had the reach, which they got for free, using the public airwaves. Nowadays that’s just not important any more. People watch time shifted and almost always NOT over the air.
So advertising grosses are down, and the broadcasters want a piece of the new big money, from the enforced payments we cough up every time we pay our monthly cable bills. The broadcasters say to the cable ops, “Just raise your rates, who cares? You’re going to pass it on to the subscribers anyway.”
The cable ops say they’re trying to keep our bills down, but the reality is they’re the ones who own many of the cable nets, and they see keeping money out of the hands of the over the air broadcasters as hurting their competition. If NBC can’t afford Law & Order, maybe TBS will be able to buy it cheaper.
At the very edge of this battle is our incomes.
We’re writing this as Fox and Time Warner have reportedly agreed to a three hour extension in their last minute talks. If there’s no deal, supposedly Fox will get pulled from Time Warner cable systems, just like ABC was pulled from Time Warner systems ten years ago.
No matter how it resolves, it seems to mark a change in the way we should be considering cable and broadcast. One has to wonder if there’s any reason to have a basic cable deal for the major cable producers that’s any different from TV-Theatrical/Exhibit A.
Oh…and…Happy New Year.
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Update: This afternoon Fox and Time Warner announced they’ve resolved the dispute. So far we haven’t seen terms of the deal.
I don’t know how actors can be anything but happy that the broadcasters are getting in on rebroadcast fees. It will prolong the life of the broadcast model, if not indefinitely then at least by a few years.
There are other indications out there that the broadcast nets will be going after a percentage of the rebroadcast fees of their non-owned affiliates soon. . .with the threat of “going cable” if they won’t play ball.
any one catch the article about how the old fashioned rabbit ears can pick up the digital signals? Seems a 200$ antenna on the roof is almost as good as any hi def cable. What is that going to do to subscription based viewing?
It’s not quite that simple (re old style rabbit ears), but certainly there are still a great many people in this country who still don’t have cable and thus wouldn’t be contributing a monthly fee.
If you do have cable, do you really want to have to switch your inputs back and forth all the time between cable and antenna? And there is still a large percentage of folks who might get some broadcast stations but not others depending on their location. And because of obstructions and multi-path, it isn’t always urban vs rural either. Tho just after the switch, I saw an article about sizeable portions of upstate Wisconsin that were very annoyed that they could no longer get Minneapolis/St. Paul TV stations even with full roof antenna setups.
“The cable ops say they’re trying to keep our bills down, but the reality is they’re the ones who own many of the cable nets, and they see keeping money out of the hands of the over the air broadcasters as hurting their competition. If NBC can’t afford Law & Order, maybe TBS will be able to buy it cheaper.”
Actually, Time Warner Cable doesn’t own TBS. Time Warner Inc. does – but Time Warner Inc. no longer owns Time Warner Cable. They spun it off. So there is no corporate connection between Time Warner Cable and TBS, and thus no acquisition incentive to this fight.
For my explanation, see
http://digitalmedialaw.blogspot.com/2010/01/cat-fight-in-foxs-den.html
OK, thanks for that. Bad example, but the logic’s the same, even if this corporate owner happens to be different.
I was more interested in the fact that Scripps, re HGTV (a favorite in this house) and Food network did NOT come to a deal with a major NY cable system, and are now gone. . .apparently permenantly from that system. Scripps was claiming HGTV as a “Top 10″ cable network, which I did some looking around and couldn’t figure out how they came to that conclusion (maybe some demo numbers I couldn’t find). As an aside, looking at those numbers, OMG is CNN in freefall. FNC has like 2.5x the audience.
Speaking of HGTV and Food, what is the union status of those kind of “reality” networks? Whether there is “acting” or not going on is perhaps arguable in some cases, but covering those hosts as “broadcasters” would seem unquestionable.