The Top Four Media Conversations I Am Having This Summer
1. The Loss of Carriage and Retrans Fees Is Why Streaming Is Such A Financial Mess
Not sure why this one is so hard to get. The (linear) television industry rakes in somewhere between $10 to $15 billion dollars every year from carriage and retrans fees paid by the MVPDs.
Streaming does not have carriage and retrans fees. (Who would you even collect them from?) As a result, the streaming business must rely on ad revenue and subscription fees. This will, eventually, provide them with a handsome income.
But it will never even remotely make up for all those billions, and thus streaming will be a less profitable business than linear. Not an unprofitable one, just less profitable.
At the same time, streaming is inevitable. Which is why the smarter players are trying to hold on to those carriage and retrans fees for as long as possible. It’s why WBD closed down CNN+. And why all of the networks keep creating original programming for linear.
They get that the amount of money carriage and retrans brings in will keep shrinking. But they also get that half of $10 billion is still $5 billion.
2. Ad Spending Will Shift To Streaming Once Ad-Supported SVOD Reaches Critical Mass
TV’s biggest spenders are brands that use TV for upper funnel image and branding campaigns. They spend a lot of money on their commercials and so they want them to run against popular original programming. They’re less concerned about reach (they get that streaming reaches lots of people) and more concerned about context.
Right now, most of the inventory on streaming is not original programming, it’s reruns. This will change once the ad-supported tiers of Netflix, Disney, HBO et al grow their subscriber base. That will take some time, but when it does happen, that is when the big budgets will shift to streaming as advertisers understand that ad-supported SVOD is the new prime time and FASTs are the new cable.
3. There are FAST Channels and FAST Services
The nomenclature for streaming is evolving but it is still confusing AF.
“FAST Channels” are linear channels that can be anything from “single IP” (devoted to a single show) to curated channels focused on a single theme with content from a range of rights holders. And anything in between.
“FAST Services” like Crackle, Freevee, LG Channels, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus, Tubi, VIZIO WatchFree+ and Xumo are home to the aforementioned FAST channels as well as sizable on-demand libraries.
These services aggregate those channels and on-demand libraries from a broad range of sources and some even produce original series and movies.
The big aggregator apps are also joined by more niche FAST services that focus on a specific audience (Revry and LGBTQIA+ content) or a specific genre (Crunchyroll and anime.)
At some point I am betting that all of the major SVOD services roll out their own linear channels (Paramount and Peacock already have) and “FAST Channels” will become just “Channels.”
But that’s a ways down the road for now, so we will have to deal with distinguishing between “FAST Channels” and “FAST Services” for a while longer.
4. LinkedIn Is Likely To Be The Biggest Beneficiary Of Twitter’s Troubles
Take away the Very Online community that comes to Twitter to debate politics and promote memes, and you’re left with the group that seems to make up a very large percentage of active users: people who are there to discuss work-related topics, to comment on recent news and thought leadership pieces, either their own or others.
Musk’s takeover of Twitter was notable for this group mostly because of the subsequent decrease in engagement they saw, whether that engagement was conversation in general or responses to their posts in particular.
For this group, LinkedIn seems like a natural home. I have no hard numbers, but I have anecdotally seen an increase in the amount of activity on LinkedIn over the past few months, something friends have corroborated.
This, admittedly, may be a TV-industry only thing, or even a my corner of the TV-industry only thing, but I suspect it is not.
While LinkedIn is far from a 1:1 Twitter substitute, especially around breaking news, it is a good source of industry news for most people and (most important) conversation on the platform has remained by and large civil and free from the sort of deliberately offensive language that clicking on the wrong Twitter “What’s Happening” link often calls up.
Meaning that I’m betting on LinkedIn picking up more traffic from Twitter than any of the potential Twitter clones from Bluesky to the new Instagram Threads.
