Latest in Pay TV Channels

Wall Street clobbered Viacom today — sending shares down 13.8% to the company’s lowest closing price in about seven years — after some comments by management yesterday left many questioning its turnaround prospects….and the future for all cable network owners. Although Viacom’s Q2 earnings beat expectations, CEO Bob Ba…

AT&T might follow this Thanksgiving weekend by cooking the pay TV industry’s golden goose. On Monday the telco formally unveils DirecTV Now, a streaming service that CEO Randall Stephenson has said will offer more than 100 networks for an astonishingly low price of $35 a month. And although the topic is much debated…

CBS, Disney, Discovery, Time Warner, Fox, Viacom, Univision and other programmers will have their day in court to block an FCC order that could give outsiders a peek at the terms of their top-secret deals with pay-TV distributors. At issue is whether entities challenging Comcast’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Ca…

This is the latest twist in the companies’ courtroom battle over pay TV channel bundling — a practice that infuriates consumers, but is essential to the finances of most Big Media companies. Cablevision says that Viacom violated anti-trust laws in a late 2012 carriage deal when it required the operator to take 14…

This may come as a surprise to the many programming executives who insist that cable and satellite customers like pay TV’s pricing bundles that require them to pay for channels that they don’t watch. Research and consulting firm PwC heard a different message in June when it surveyed 1,008 people about their video…

A new study by Digital TV Research reports that there are currently 814 million pay-TV households in 97 countries worldwide. The jump to 1 billion homes by 2018 will be led by the booming Asia Pacific region which will rep 59% (587 million) of the global total. Still, the research indicates a slight slowdown in…

Funny how the prices that Big Media companies charge for their pay TV channels rarely have much to do with the consideration that really matters: How many people actually watch? That’s what makes Verizon‘s new effort to link payments with audience levels, which The Wall Street Journal disclosed this morning, so…

PwC says that television execs have a little time to relax before their lucrative business models implode. The consulting firm reached its conclusion after sponsoring a recent debate between the Marketing Association of the Columbia Business School and the Virginia Commonwealth University Brandcenter on the question:…

Lazard Capital Markets’ Barton Crockett seems to think so in a thought experiment this morning. Asked to envision a change that could reshape the long-term prospects for media — part of Lazard’s Imagine That collection of analyst essays — he says that it “could be good for content-owning conglomerates” if consumers…

Apparently so, according to writer Derek Thompson’s well researched and engagingly presented, but unfortunately misguided, article about pay TV pricing (“Prisoners of Cable“) in the latest issue of my favorite magazine, The Atlantic. He acknowledges that the seven largest Big Media companies — including News Corp…

That’s the critically important question that’s being debated  across the industry and — finally! — head-on by two of the Street’s savviest analysts: Bernstein Research’s Todd Juenger and Craig Moffett. Juenger kicked things off in a note last week, and Moffett delivered his response today. The core issue is whether…

The conclusions are part of an intriguing study out this morning from Lazard Capital Markets analyst Barton Crocket. Like many Wall Street analysts, he’s eager to know which programmers have the most to gain, and lose, if the current pay TV ecosystem — which requires consumers to pay for channels that they don’t watch…