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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The math just doesn’t work with fully unbundling. I’m not defending bundling at all, but the alternative doesn’t add up. Let’s say Hulu Live has 5 million customers paying $2.75 in carriage fees for TNT (numbers from a quick web search and approximated). That means Hulu pays $13.75 million to TNT, and TNT gets that whether or not a subscriber watches TNT or not.

    If TNT went unbundled and their own way ala Disney+, and only took 10% of subscribers, you’d be paying $27.50 to keep TNT going at their current carriage fees. And that’s assuming they could continue to charge the same pricing to advertisers. If their subscribers go from 5 million to 500,000, no advertiser is going to pay the rate that TNT charges now, so there is more money to make up.

    Unfortunately, especially with live sports, bundling channels together is the only way it’s going to make financial sense to run a network like TNT. And that’s just factoring in Hulu, if all the other streamers and cable companies went that way it’d just be worse.