A celebrity news mainstay is going under. PeopleTV is a video offshoot of the popular magazine. According to an email sent to Philo subscribers, the channel is shutting down January 31.
Until that day, the channel is still available on several platforms including DistroTV, Fubo, Local Now, Philo, Stirr, Tubi, and Xumo Play. The channel’s social media accounts have been shut down.
According to the email, any PeopleTV content saved to Philo DVRs will disappear after that day, so now’s the time to catch up on any shows you may have saved.
PeopleTV is owned by Dotdash Meredith, the largest digital and print publisher in America. In 2021, Dotdash (formerly About.com) bought Meredith. In early 2022, the company pulled the plug on the print editions of Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, EatingWell, Health, Parents, and People en Español.
The merged entity suffered a 28% year-over-year revenue drop in December 2022, and company leadership blamed a softening ad market and slow integration of the two media brands. “These mergers are hard, and this was really hard and slow,” CEO Neil Vogel told Business Insider. “And in a good market, nobody sees your mistakes. In a bad market, everyone sees every mistake.”
The channels that appear on FAST services usually feature inexpensive content. It may be reruns of an old sitcom or a faux news channel where an angry person’s face gets progressively redder as they rant in front of a green screen. In the case of PeopleTV, the content didn’t look terribly expensive, but the channel didn’t have the same luxury of reruns. Celebrities age, the hot new movie today is buried on a streaming service tomorrow, even scandals cool after a few weeks. So PeopleTV had to continue churning more and more content to keep its channel fresh. That meant paying a crew and talent and editors and producers at the very least. As multiple media companies stare down an advertising crunch in 2022, more channels like these might start to fall.
Even though the channel did appear on paid services like Philo and Sling TV, its existence on FAST services means subscribers may not be missing much. And if you do have an itch for that kind of content, there are plenty of places to get it for free.