Hollywood ... as in, the end of ....

Another sign of the modern era - ESPN immediately gets shellacked on all sorts of social media and independent websites.

Some are even blaming Steven A. Smith. He naturally replies.

"What? I can't believe you said that. I literally can't believe what I have just heard. My brain is exploding from this negativity. I am the shining star of this industry. People are known to drop everything just to hear my take on things. I am just like Jim Rome, except louder. A lot louder. You want to hear me emote? Stand back and cower in fear. I am about to unleash myself on your behind. And I can do this for hours each day. Because that's what it takes. Shouting. Screaming. Raised eyebrows. Rolled eyes. The rest is irrelevant. Let me repeat this. Irrelevant. With a bunch of "rrrrrr's". Am I rrrrright? I am always rrrrright. Because I am the loudest. And so it shall be written and so it shall be said. In HD. On ESPN. The "screaming your guts away" show. Each noon eastern".
 
That article is, at least partially, incorrect. They did not close ERT- ESPN Regional Television, or as they referred to it, "it's Charlotte, NC production headquarters...". They will no longer do "wraps" out of there, they will be done out of Bristol as the article says. There is still a fair amount of remote production based out of ERT, their Charlotte facility, as well as the entire SEC Network.
 
And the good news keep pouring - or is it "purring"? - in.


Cable's day of reckoning has come. With all the major cable and satellite companies having reported their quarterly numbers, analyst firm MoffettNathanson put together a new cord-cutting report, and things are bad. Pay-TV providers lost an estimated 762,000 pay-TV subscribers over the first three months of this year—five times more than they lost during the same period last year.
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https://news.fastcompany.com/cord-cutting-spikes-fivefold-in-cable-tvs-worst-quarter-ever-4036578
 
I'm not "cutting", but I am thinking about cutting back. My DIRECTV bill is within a few hairs of $200/month, now. Yes, I have "all the channels", but we watch very few of them.

Bottom line, though, if you want to watch "cable programming" legally, you're going to have to pay someone, whether it's the cable company, sat company or paying directly for direct streaming. Even if you go the illegal routes, like kodi, you still have to pay for internet service, and some providers have data caps. So, unless you're going to only watch OTA TV or stop watching everything, you're going to pay a media company somewhere, something. There is no 'free lunch'.
 
Prices for direct streaming here in Spain: Netflix 10 eur/month (though the catalogue is smaller than in the US, specially for films), HBO 8 eur/month, spotify 10 eur/month
 
Run&Gun said:
I'm not "cutting", but I am thinking about cutting back. My DIRECTV bill is within a few hairs of $200/month, now. Yes, I have "all the channels", but we watch very few of them.

Bottom line, though, if you want to watch "cable programming" legally, you're going to have to pay someone, whether it's the cable company, sat company or paying directly for direct streaming. Even if you go the illegal routes, like kodi, you still have to pay for internet service, and some providers have data caps. So, unless you're going to only watch OTA TV or stop watching everything, you're going to pay a media company somewhere, something. There is no 'free lunch'.
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Sure, personally, I get that there's no free lunch. But that's soo much money for something which is already subsidized through advertising!

To continue the metaphor,
It's like buying a meal at a fancy restaurant when someone else paid the restaurant to pad out the meal with sawdust!
 
Thanks to competition from so many new forms of entertainment -- Netflix, Facebook, Snapchat -- audiences for traditional TV networks, from ESPN to MTV, are declining. In the current TV season, the four major broadcasters have lost 8 percent of their audience. Because of the slumping ratings, advertisers who want to reach a certain amount of eyeballs can’t get what they need from television anymore.

To make up for the shrinking audiences and keep ad sales high, TV networks have kept raising their rates, believing ad buyers will just have to spend more to reach the people they need. TV ratings have dropped 33 percent in the last four years while TV ad prices are up 20 percent during that period, according to Magna, the ad-buying agency owned by Interpublic Group of Cos.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...s-stop-paying-more-for-declining-tv-audiences
 
combatentropy said:
Citation needed :)
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There's a law against self-incrimination, you know.

In any case, to prove that the Old Business isn't dead yet, Sinclair Broadcasting is about to buy Tribune's Media's TV for just under $4 billion (with a "b"). Sinclair is already the largest local TV operator with 173 stations and will add 42 more, with WGN (Chicago), KTLA (LA) and WPIX (NYC) new to their roster. They may have to divest some stations in the process. The deal isn't closed yet, with the usual hurdles remaining.
 
One more shot in favor of the "old Hollywood" (maybe).

Wall Street Journal is reporting that the VR sets that were supposed to account for ~ $6.5B worth of sales only accounted for ~ $1.5B and are stuck on the shelves.

The full article is behind the WSJ pay wall (or pay street) but, if someone is a subscriber ... don't tell anyone.
 
And YouTube rolls out YouTube TV (in selected markets near you ... but not me ... yet) for $35/mo.

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/youtube-rolls-own-live-tv-143517724.html

A monthly subscription lands you over 50 channels, including live content from the four major networks, ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX, as well as a wide range of sports channels, and a number of other cable staples like USA, FX, and plenty more. Users will also have access to original online video content from YouTube’s subscription-based YouTube Red service.
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What are the actual numbers in those ratings, I wonder? It's possible somebody reading the numbers is doing a common, but very wrong calculation. For example, a drop from 100 to 70 is a 30% drop. (100-70=30; 30 is 30% of 100.) The common mistake would be taking the 30 and calculating its relationship to 70, and thinking that it's a drop of 42.86% (30 being 42.86% of 70); but really, the 42.86% in relationship to the three numbers is that 100 is a 42.86% increase from 70. Still, the drop looks to be significant regardless.
 
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