Is a Cable Renaissance Coming in the Wake of New Disney-Spectrum Carriage Deal?
“Less is more” is often a phrase used by someone trying to convince you to take a bad deal. But for Spectrum TV customers, less may truly be more when it comes to parent company Charter's new carriage deal with Disney.
As part of the new agreement, eight Disney-owned channels were dropped permanently from the Spectrum TV lineup. Among these were Disney XD, Nat Geo Wild, and other selections whose content can also be found on Disney+ Basic, which Spectrum TV users now get access to at no additional charge.
Analysis from The Hollywood Reporter shows that if cable companies want to continue paring down the number of superfluous channels they offer, there are some obvious candidates out there. Paramount has numerous spinoffs of MTV and BET that it could pull, and Warner Bros. Discovery could stop offering Boomerang, American Heroes and other smaller channels if it wanted to focus on its biggest linear networks like TNT and TBS.
Smaller channel packages would allow cable companies to cut prices. That’s not normally something companies are interested in doing, but considering the alternative is to continue watching helplessly as customers cut the cord, executives will likely choose survival first. A survey from this summer found that cable users regularly watch around 15 channels in their package, even though the average cable/satellite plan carries 190 channels. That adds up to cable subscribers paying around $1,600 per year for networks they don’t watch often, or at all.
Providers could also look to deals like the Disney-Spectrum agreement as a blueprint for augmenting their skinnier channel packages. Spectrum is creating a new, sports-focused channel package that includes access to ESPN+ and top cable sports networks for subscribers, and other companies could easily do likewise with entertainment and news-themed bundles as well.
If cable providers can incorporate lower-priced channel bundles with aggregated packages of streaming services at prices lower than what customers would pay to get all that entertainment a la carte, it could lead to a big revival for cable. This renaissance could help major sports leagues and legacy media companies transition more easily from linear to streaming formats and would allow customers to access more of the content they want from fewer sources.
Streaming and cable have been seen as adversaries ever since the launch of Hulu in the mid-2000s. But their future might be together, at least in the short term, as the Disney-Spectrum carriage deal illustrates. The embracing of streaming combined with smaller, cheaper channel bundles might help cable to not only survive but thrive in the next few years.
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