Latest in Cable TV

Cable TV outlet Black News Channel has abruptly shut down after two years on the air, and just after hitting new viewership highs during this week’s confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson. In a memo to employees, CEO Princell Hair cited “challenging market conditions and global financial…

Pay-TV providers lost almost 4.7 million net video subscribers in 2021, according to a new report by Leichtman Research Group. The company surveys companies representing about 93% of the total market. It found that overall losses last year moderated slightly compared with 2020, when about 4.9 million people cut the…

GSN, the game-focused media brand owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, has promoted longtime sales chief John Zaccario to the position of president. Zaccario, a 13-year company veteran who had held the title of EVP of Ad Sales, succeeds Mark Feldman, who left to join Scopely after the company acquired the GSN Games…

ESPN Classic will go dark on January 1, ending a nearly three-decade run of nostalgic pay-TV sports programming. The network was founded as Classic Sports Network in 1995 and was acquired by ESPN in 1997. The decision to shut it down follows several years of declining distribution. Several major providers had dropped…

UPDATED with reports of some customers having service restored. Before Comcast can come back to the bargaining table with a new offer for 21st Century Fox assets, it will likely need to get its broadband service back up and running. As the battle with Disney over Fox continues, the No. 1 U.S. cable provider is dealing…

The rumbling under the ground of traditional television is growing louder according to the results of Deloitte’s latest annual Digital Democracy Survey, which polled 2,131 U.S. consumers in early November. The audit, consulting, tax and advisory firm found that 74% of U.S. households subscribe to pay TV and about…

UPDATE, 7:23PM: ESPN has thrown up a red flag to Verizon’s plan to allow FiOS TV subscribers to choose smaller “skinny” packages of programming bundles tailored a little more closely to individual consumer tastes — including splitting off ESPN and ESPN2 into sports bundles. The Re/code website reported late this…

Cable a la carte pricing, whereby consumers pay for only the channels they want, has finally broken through in Canada. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission said in a sweeping ruling today that cable and satellite providers must offer consumers an affordable basic lineup and allow them to…

Forget all the talk about how much people hate their cable and satellite companies, and want to cut the cord. Pay TV is “probably the best bargain in entertainment today” and doesn’t have a big problem appealing to consumers, Disney CFO Jay Rasulo told an investor gathering today. Disney was thinking offensively…

It’s time for the pay TV industry’s annual slap in the face from the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which surveys 70,000 people about the products and services they use most. Cable and satellite distributors always fare badly in these polls — but this year’s results are especially disturbing after a slight uptic…

In this week’s podcast, Deadline’s executive editor David Lieberman and host David Bloom preview the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show, which David L. will be covering in Las Vegas. Among the big trends the Davids say we can expect from the mammoth show: big, big TVs showing ultra-high-definition “4K” images; new tech…

ANALYSIS FROM COMIC-CON: Last evening, I attended a Comic-Con preview screening for the USA series Psych and saw that rabid fans camped out 12 hours in a line around the block just to glimpse an episode that will soon screen on their TV sets. Today, I see an Emmy nomination count for cable TV series that dwarfs…