It’s now just been reported that Chris Wallace is leaving CNN to “explore podcasting”. With the recent new CNN is firing hundreds of employees after going from 13.3 million average viewers in 2016 to… 800k in 2024. Comcast is looking to ditch their dumpster fire MSNBC, CNBC, Oxygen, Sci-Fi, and Bravo networks because they’re probably putting out the same or worse decline as cnn. Peacock, NBCs streaming service has yet to turn a profit. And the icing on the cake? “According to Forbes, there were only three cable networks in 2023 with an average audience above one million viewers, down from five the previous year and down from 19 in 2013.” They’re dying on the vine, their streaming services can’t make money, and they are too useless to even keep around as propaganda rags. With the potential death of the first AAA game publisher on the horizon (Ubisoft) we are seeing largest consequences of “get woke go broke” in our lifetimes.
Update: The Guardian is no longer posting on X, Don Lemon is leaving X, expect more to follow suit. This is just hilarious.
Edit 2: numbers reflect an average from last Wednesday to Friday. That marks a 54% decrease in the network's viewership average in the month of October (1.765 million viewers) as well as a 51% decrease in the network's year-to-date 2024 average (1.655 million viewers). Additionally, on Friday MSNBC saw 636,000 viewers and 61,000 in the demo, making it the network's lowest rated non-holiday night of the year.
There's been a real about-face with cable regional sports networks as well.
About a decade ago, there was lots of talk in the baseball/cable network world that live sports like baseball would prop up cable companies because men would continue to watch & pay for live sports which didn't lend themselves well to on-demand streaming models.
A bunch of midmarket baseball teams signed ludicrous contracts with some of these regional sports networks for the exclusive rights to broadcast the local 9s games.
Baseball is a very regional sport. Most of the revenue still comes from gate receipts and broadcasting rights because it's not a national product: people only care about their local team and don't watch nationally televised games.
Payrolls, salaries and collective bargaining agreements have really become inflated assuming that these ludicrous nine-figure cable deals were the new normal.
The business model worked that local baseball fans would stay subscribed to the RSN channel with high fees to watch their team, but still more normies would end up paying the same fees without knowing by subscribing to bundled cable packages.
Over the last few years, the main player who signed a lot of these broadcasting agreements, Sinclair Broadcasting/Bally Sports has essentially gone bankrupt, walking away from their end of the deal before it expired. A lot of midmarket baseball teams who had already budgeted that future revenue were suddenly left without a broadcaster, but still left to pay guaranteed player salaries. The MLB Head Office has had to intervene to run interference so that it doesn't look like their league's broadcasting rights for all but their marquee market teams have no value.
The MLB actually pioneered digital streaming of live games, but completely dropped the ball on capitalizing on the early adoption. The league ended selling their MLB Advanced Media streaming platform to ?Disney years ago just so that the 30 team owners would get a 30 million or so cash dividend.
The league does sell a year-long streaming package to stream games digitally, but geofences access with blackouts so that users can only watch out-of-market games but can't watch locally. There are some places in the Midwest like Iowa where locals are blacked out from watching something like 7 teams despite there being no major league team in the state simply due to overlapping territorial claims.
The geofencing & the digital blackouts are mostly in place to protect the value of the previously highly-priced TV broadcast rights each team had sold.
In the last few years, the MLB has allowed some local teams to sell local digital live game streaming rights directly to consumers. But most teams have simply bundled this as part of a perk to the regional sports network cable package.