EDITOR'S NOTE
Welcome To The Exchange Newsletter! Kelly is still out on maternity leave, so CNBC anchor Bill Griffeth is jumping in the chair today.
My son called the other day. He asked if my wife and I had signed up for Disney+ yet.
He and his wife were coming for dinner in a few days, and they wanted us all to watch the first episode of “The Mandalorian,” the TV series about the futuristic bounty hunter in the Star Wars universe. So we added Disney+ to the other streaming services we already subscribe to, including Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple+. And next spring we will be adding HBO Max and NBC’s own Peacock. (Have I missed anything?)
I’m having déjà vu. (Yes, this is all leading to a history lesson. Kelly loves it when I do that. So here you are, Kel.)
When my wife and I were married in the spring of 1982, we bought a small home in suburban Los Angeles, and we immediately subscribed to cable TV, mainly because I was anchoring for Financial News Network, the first cable channel devoted to business news, which I helped put on the air (on the cable?) in late 1981.
There weren’t many cable channels at that time. There was HBO, ESPN, & CNN, which together met viewers’ basic needs: movies, sports and news. Then programmers started to get creative. MTV and their video music jocks debuted in the summer of ’81. (Fun fact: The first music video to be aired was “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles).
The real flood of channel introductions began in 1982 with the Home Shopping Club, which became the Home Shopping Network (HSN), CNN2 (later Headline News, now called HLN), The Weather Channel, The Entertainment Channel (which later merged with the Arts Channel to become A&E), and the Playboy Channel. The Disney Channel showed up in 1983, and my personal favorite – American Movie Classics – debuted in 1984. It later morphed into AMC and started producing its own programming, including “Breaking Bad.” I miss the late Bob Dorian and his movie introductions. Thank goodness for TCM.
You see where this is going. The introduction of all these streaming services today remind me very much of the early days of cable. The scenario is the same: New technology spurs programmers to create content designed to lure viewers willing to spend money on monthly subscriptions.
But there’s one big difference. The stakes now are much much higher. The dollars the Streamers are spending on programming is exponentially greater than what was spent on the early cable channels. (The audiences are also much larger.) So there is much less room for error. Cable channels came and went all the time. (Anyone remember the Satellite News Channel?). But for the Streamers, failure is not an option.
And because subscription costs are going up, more people are cutting the cord and abandoning cable. Cable subscriptions peaked in 2014 at just over 100 million homes. Today they are down to roughly 72 million. So I have come full circle. Which is fine. One of my favorite sayings is “If nothing ever changed, we would all still be in caves.”
Just don’t mess with my TCM. 
KEY STORIES
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
