Cable TV Faces Its Most Serious Threat Yet

And just like that, the cable television industry is collapsing because ESPN just pulled the plug. For decades, ESPN was the duct tape holding your $200 cable bundle together. Most people weren't paying for C Span or the History Channel. They were paying for Monday Night Football. Now you can get all of ESPN. Games, shows, stats, even a personalized sports center for 29.95amonth. No cable required. This is massive, because once ESPN goes solo, guess who's in trouble? All the channels that were coasting on cable fees. Tlc, History Channel, Hallmark, Discovery, even C Span. No more free ride. In this brave new world, every show has to actually find an audience willing to pay for it. That's terrifying for network execs, but great for for consumers. Power shifts away from clueless gatekeepers and toward viewers. You pay only for what you love, which might mean subscribing to 20 different platforms and selling a kidney to watch TV. But here's a message to every ambitious creator out there. Stop pitching shows to executives who don't return your emails. Just make your show. Find your people. Build your audience that the future isn't bundled, it's earned. So I may have gone overboard in the beginning of this commentary. I don't think it's universally a good thing for everyone, because there are people who all they do is watch TV all day long. And instead of getting a bundle for 90 or 100 bucks, or maybe at the most 200 bucks, they string together 18 different subscriptions and they could be spending $500 a month. Now, that's not a good thing, but arguably you shouldn't be watching that much tv even in my own household. And I pride myself in trying to limit myself to no more than an hour of TV per day in a typical week, which gives you at most a little more than two movies a week. I found that I've now added more subscription services. I get Amazon prime as a part of prime, so I'm sort of paying for that indirectly. Netflix, I pay for HBO Max. And then I finally found that I just couldn't get by without Apple plus because they're putting out so many good shows. So my monthly subscription is climbing back up there. And I'm someone who cut the cable bill a long time ago because I personally don't really watch any sports and I don't watch it news. I read news, or I look at it at a place like the format you're looking at right now on social media. But. So it's not universally a good thing. But in general, I do think it is. Good for most people. And it's frankly a golden age for creators. When I was starting my career in the 1980s, so much of my time was dealing with gatekeepers, pitching networks, picking pitching station managers. I well remember late 1980s physically driving to virtually every TV station in Florida, where I was living at the time, and begging station managers to take a meeting with me to air my political commentary, weekly news analysis show. And I did in fact find one station in every market, 10 markets, and got it on. But it was a grueling process, the difficult process. It was a costly pro. Then I had to FedEx big tapes of the show in different formats to all the stations on a Thursday night. So it was extraordinarily difficult. I had to appease all of these gatekeepers. Forget making money, I lost money. These days, creators can just create. George Lopez, the famed comedian, just had his TV show canceled from a major, major network. But countless comedians aren't dealing with networks anymore. They just have their own show. Joe Rogan, comedian making a quarter of a billion dollars some years from his podcast these days it's actually pretty rare to for a famous Hollywood comedian to not also have their own podcast video typically, as well as audio, and making even more money from that. Trevor Noah, the former host of the Daily show, left the Daily show in part because he could make more money from his own podcast, plus had the freedom to travel and work when he wanted to. So the hard part for most people is how do you start if you're already a famous Hollywood celebrity or a TV talk show host like Trevor Noah. Yes, you can migrate over, control your destiny, create and put it out there. But how do you actually start? Especially if you do want to do something in the fictional world and you're not just doing news analysis, it certainly does happen. Let's ask our good friend ChatGPT for examples of this. My co host for the program ChatGPT, I'm wondering if you can give us examples of people who did creative shows that weren't just news or comedians sitting around BSing, but created shows, whether it is on YouTube or other social media, and got it to the point where they had sizable audiences and significant revenue. Certainly Mr. K, Mr. Beast is an example of doing some way. He's not doing news, he's doing comedy and famously brings in hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue. Not all profit, obviously. Are there other cases like that or is he sort of a one off?

Mr. Beast is definitely a standout, but he's not the only one who's built A huge audience and significant revenue with creative content. For example, Dude Perfect started with trick shot videos and turned it into a massive brand with millions of followers, partnership, and their own merchandise. Rhett and Link of Good Mythical Morning created a daily show that blends comedy, challenges and quirky experiments, building a huge following and a successful business empire. Another example is Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer who creates inventive science and engineering videos, which have garnered millions of views and led to lucrative sponsorships and product lines.

There are actually a lot of them. Good Mythical Morning is a good example. I mean, they're huge. It's not a show I watch on a regular basis, but when you look at it, you think, wow, this is as good as the Today show. Any big TV network, they did it all from scratch. A couple of guys from North Carolina, where I'm from, they just started it from scratch, built audience day by day and they put together a whole empire. I mean, I do think we are in a time where if you tell yourself, I'm just the talent or I'm just the host, I'm just a news anchor, your career is over. Or your chances have slimmed to the point where unless you win the lottery, you're going to be unemployed and unemployable. But we do live in a golden age for people who say, you know what? There's something I don't know how to do, I'm going to learn it. And you look at the most successful content creators, whether it's a Mr. Beast or the mythical beast or the mythical Morning guys, they are people who say, well, I'm going to talk on camera, I'm going to be funny, I'm going to write my own jokes. For those doing humor, I'm going to learn lighting, I'm going to learn editing, I'm going to learn promotions, I'm going to learn copywriting, I'm going to learn distribution, I'm going to learn partnerships. I'm going to learn all these things. It's hundreds of different skills. It's what? In a TV network, there are hundreds of people specialized it where they do that one thing all day long. Whereas these new content creators are doing a little bit of all of them. Maybe not as well, but the economics are so different. If you're a TV network and you put on a show for an hour and you've got 50 people working on the show and the show makes $200,000 a year, well, you've probably lost millions and millions of dollars if you're having to pay the salaries of 50 people. But if you're one or two people and you bring in a couple hundred thousand a year and your hard cost, or almost nil, because you're doing everything yourself, all of a sudden you have a career, you have a job. So that's why I think this is more significant. Is cable TV going to just disappear overnight? No, but this is much more significant than the subtle erosions we've seen down year over year. This is more of, you know, several giant rocks from the dam are coming out, and now the water is really coming out quickly and the whole thing could come down soon.