Thursday Rants and Rambles

Something new I thought I’d try. None of these are deep enough for an entire post, but they’ve been on my mind, making me more ornery than usual, and so I thought I’d throw them out there for everyone else to ruminate on.Why Are Pay-TV Services from MVPDs Like Sling And DirectTV Now Considered “Cord Cutting”?  This one’s been bothering me for a while.  If someone is actively paying money to watch pay-TV, and they’re paying that money to a traditional MVPD, how does that qualify as “cord cutting”? Yet plenty of click-bait articles will gladly lump the million plus people watching TV via Sling and DirecTV Now in the same category with people who have cut back to antennas and Netflix.Two completely different animals.In the former example, they’re still paying for television. The delivery mechanism is slightly different, but the money is going to all the usual suspects. The only difference is that there’s no set top box, something we strongly suspect will be the case for almost all TV viewers over the next five years or so, as MVPDs do away with the unnecessary hardware. Silicon Valley really wants TV to die, but it’s not going so quickly—it’s changing, not dying. Huge difference.Silicon Valley Blindness.  Every time I watch an episode of the excellent HBO series “Silicon Valley”, I’m reminded of how out of touch many Valley denizens are with the real world. This is where the “TV is dead” narrative comes from—they don’t personally know anyone who admits to watching linear broadcast TV, so clearly no one is. There was a piece a few months back in The Information about the failure of an Uber-for-laundry service that attracted a fair amount of VC money. Never dawned on them that the market for that sort of thing is pretty narrow: people who make enough money to afford to outsource their laundry each week, but not enough to hire a weekly cleaning service, the sort that will also wash and fold and even put away your laundry for you. That’s a pretty narrow band and doesn’t even eliminate all those people who shudder at the thought of someone else handling their unmentionables. But typical of how isolated from the mainstream many Valleyites have become and why a false narrative around the imminent death of TV has become an article of faith among so many.ESPN Is A Giant “TBD.”  While it’s easy to point to ESPN’s travails as proof that the industry is falling apart, there are still a whole lot of unanswered questions that may point to ESPN being an outlier rather than a canary in a coal mine.

• How much did ESPN’s decision to create a half dozen ESPN variations hurt their core brand? Did the brand's identity get hopelessly muddled by that, and did people decide that while they occasionally wanted to watch an NFL game, they didn't want to pay for the Slovenia versus Belarus women's horseshoe finals?
• How much of their falling viewership numbers can be attributed to Americans falling out of love with pro sports? NFL numbers were way down this fall. Which could mean people are over pro football, or it could mean that they were too fatigued by election coverage to tune in, or that it was just a boring season. NCAA March Madness numbers were way up this year, and eSports is booming, but we’ll need another year or two of NFL to know for sure. Everything is cyclical, so Americans falling out of love with the NFL would not be a huge shock.
• How much did their decision to make SportsCenter their centerpiece hurt? It’s well done, but it’s also very insidery, with a strong political stance of the sort that creates Twitter boycotts. I’m more curious about the former: did the uber-insider tone turn off a lot of casual sports fans? Not hard to see how that might happen.
• How much of their decline is due to the fact that their core audience consists of young men, 18-35, many of whom don’t have a pay-TV subscription and use their parents log-in credentials when they want to watch something on ESPN?
• How harmful was all the negative PR around how much ESPN cost and how sports in general was driving up the cost of pay-TV?

Again, this is not to downplay ESPN’s situation, but rather to ask if they’re an outlier or if what’s happening to them is symptomatic of what’s happening to the industry in general.  I think time will tell, but it's too soon to make that call right now.