The Multi-video Kaleidoscope

By The PHANTOM –

You remember the old kid’s game called spin the bottle, where the boys get in a circle on the floor and a girl spins a bottle around? Or vice versa. Whoever it points to when it stops has to do something crazy, like kiss the person who spun the bottle. The girl who spun the bottle always reached out and grabbed it if it looked at all like it might stop on me; she made it stop on someone else. I used to wonder why, but in recent years I have gotten a suspicion as to why she did that, and it is not encouraging. Anyway, as I read what is happening in the programming world today, my head spins faster than the bottle ever did. With more and more people getting into the act of spinning the bottle, uh, packaging the TV programming and selling it through our pipe, more joint ventures forming to sell programs while program production is being reduced, it’s more than this ancient haunt can keep up with. Do you old timers ever long for the old days when we used to compete to buy up franchises, and we worried about CTB and pirates? I don’t either, but it was a much simpler world back then, and at least I could sort-of understand it.

Let’s see, companies A, B, and C are big multinationals with fingers in a bunch of things. They get together to form a programming partnership D, and MSO E agrees to carry it, along with the MVPD arm of company B, who are in partnership with existing programmer F, which sells its programming to B and C but not to A, though A is considering expanding its existing programming arm, G, by establishing a partnership with F, which will compete with D except in the EMA region, where they will establish a joint venture H to sell programming to A’s systems in that region. Get the picture? Me neither. But I’m thinking that it might make a neat skit on Saturday Night Live or at the next SCTE TechExpo.

Oh, and one of the major sports leagues, which will provide the most profitable programming to programmer D (who hopes they can reach such a deal), is expecting a record windfall of many billions of bucks in the season for which the new deal may take effect. And here I come to the heart of the problem: money. Heck, if it weren’t for money we wouldn’t have many problems at all. Anyway, it looks to me like we are making the joint ventures and complex money flows to try and insulate us from the fact that there is just not enough money available in the pockets of subscribers for everybody to get as much of the currency of the realm as they want. What we may wind up with is a lot of skinnier programming bundles. We hadn’t seen that phrase in a bunch of lifetimes—maybe not in as much as six months—but it was back this month.

So what is this skinny bundle? So far as I know, it is selling subscribers smaller bundles of channels so that they can come closer to buying only the channels that interest them. Hey, is that an idea? Give the subscribers what they want? Nahh, no one in their right mind would do that. At one time there was this crazy idea of à la carte channels, a concept in which subscribers bought only the channels in which they were interested. Now in the analog days it was not technically feasible to offer à la carte channels, but you could argue that now it is technically feasible. Can you manage it and can you pay the bills with the revenue it brings in? Maybe, maybe not. But maybe it is time to seriously think about the skinny bundle again. That will require some programmers to accept that their primary program is not going to go to all subscribers, with them collecting money for it regardless of whether or not a particular subscriber wants it—he must pay for it. And that means that some of the people who provide the programs may have to accept some reduction in revenue. Maybe that’s a bridge too far. But it might be good for the subscriber, who pays the bill. And there is a philosophy saying that what’s good for the customer is good for us.

There have been a few times in my haunting of the cable TV industry that I have had to make recommendations to customers that resulted in lower revenue for my employer. I did it and hoped that our accountant wouldn’t find out. The philosophy was that what was good for the customer was good for the industry, and what was good for the industry was good for us. Even if it meant a temporary reduction in revenue. In the end, well, what was good for the customer was good for us. Can people still make that decision? If they spin the bottle and it points to you, can you do what is best for your customer?

You never know when The “masked” Phantom is standing right beside you. Sometimes he is in a Zoom meeting or virtual SCTE training session with you. He may be hanging with the suits and other times with the front liners. But be assured, The Phantom knows all and, most importantly, The Phantom sees all!

—

Image: Shutterstock