I use Spectrum myself, and I turned on my TV this morning to see the message: “Disney has removed their programming from Spectrum. We are fighting to keep costs down while maintaining consumer choice”
I don’t watch Disney channel of course. But I do watch ESPN. Currently, the ESPN channel shows this long message: “we offered the Walt Disney company a fair deal, yet they are demanding but they refused etc etc etc”
Spectrum has 14.7 million subscribers
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/01/media/disney-spectrum-cable-carriage-deal/index.html
I don’t think this will last long.
This is mainly due to the general demand for ESPN.
It is likely Charter/Spectrum is trying to get the programming costs (per subscriber account) to be more in line with what they want to tolerate.
This type of situation will continue.
What will likely also happen is that more and more people will be migrating to On Demand-type streaming services and DTCs (Direct-to-Consumer). That linear Live TV will reduce down individual number of channels. That there will be a growing number of companies which will discontinue having and selling a linear Live TV television lineup. And the big companies—like Comcast/xfinity and Charter/Spectrum—will be among the last to hang in for that.
As a Live TV service only accessible by Internet, Google’s YouTube TV will continue to grow. It was the only cable-television provider to have an increase in subscriptions over the last year. It does not carry some programming (like A&E, History, Lifetime), but it does carry a lot of core programmers (Disney/ABC and Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery programmers’s brands). But, for under $75 for its Base Plan (channel lineup), and that it includes Local programming stations, it is more affordable for some.
The rest of this decade, when it comes to the television industry, should get even more interesting.
