The problem with forcing unbundling is then you'd have a huge number of people paying only for ESPN (which costs a lot of money) and tons of other channels would simply go out of business. Maybe that's a good thing? I don't know, I'm a cord-cutter.
The entire model of having "channels" is going away. Studios already produce content across multiple genres; "channels" are just their way of organizing those shows into packages to make them easier to show on a linear cable channel.
Netflix and Amazon have shown that you can manage a single brand with many genres beneath. There's no need to have channels; we can just have "ABC", "NBC", "Fox", "Scripps", etc. ABC would include ESPN, Disney, and all their other channels; Fox would include FX and whatever else Fox has, etc.
It won't happen overnight, but I would expect channels to go away gradually over the next decade.
At that point, we won't even have those channel/network brands to the same extent. The independent production studios that actually make the shows will increasingly take their shows directly to Netflix/Amazon/etc.
Most production studios are owned by the networks. Media is a very incestuous business where a group of 7-10 companies own nearly the entire industry. They get away with it because nobody usually owns more than 10-20% of any single company in the next level of the chain. So a production company may be owned by 6 different networks, all of whom bid on which shows they want to pick up for distribution. But in the end, all the money flows to the same people, and the relationships between producers and distributors are where the value in the industry is.
Whoever runs the money today (the networks) will continue to do so in the future, because they own the entire supply chain. The people who make a living funding TV shows today will continue to do so regardless of the distribution channel. It's all a shell game :)
Comments
The problem with forcing unbundling is then you'd have a huge number of people paying only for ESPN (which costs a lot of money) and tons of other channels would simply go out of business. Maybe that's a good thing? I don't know, I'm a cord-cutter.
The entire model of having "channels" is going away. Studios already produce content across multiple genres; "channels" are just their way of organizing those shows into packages to make them easier to show on a linear cable channel.
Netflix and Amazon have shown that you can manage a single brand with many genres beneath. There's no need to have channels; we can just have "ABC", "NBC", "Fox", "Scripps", etc. ABC would include ESPN, Disney, and all their other channels; Fox would include FX and whatever else Fox has, etc.
It won't happen overnight, but I would expect channels to go away gradually over the next decade.
At that point, we won't even have those channel/network brands to the same extent. The independent production studios that actually make the shows will increasingly take their shows directly to Netflix/Amazon/etc.
Most production studios are owned by the networks. Media is a very incestuous business where a group of 7-10 companies own nearly the entire industry. They get away with it because nobody usually owns more than 10-20% of any single company in the next level of the chain. So a production company may be owned by 6 different networks, all of whom bid on which shows they want to pick up for distribution. But in the end, all the money flows to the same people, and the relationships between producers and distributors are where the value in the industry is.
Whoever runs the money today (the networks) will continue to do so in the future, because they own the entire supply chain. The people who make a living funding TV shows today will continue to do so regardless of the distribution channel. It's all a shell game :)