M&E Forecast: Slowing Growth, Tighter Choke Points

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Two five-year forecasts issued this week together paint a picture of a much tougher business environment facing media and entertainment companies over the next half decade.

According to PwC’s annual Outlook report, the media and entertainment industries are nearing a revenue “plateau,” particularly video-centric industries, as many historical growth drivers are running out of steam. Worldwide, PwC expects M&E revenue to rise from $1.8 trillion in 2016 to $2.2 trillion in 2021, representing a compound annual growth rate of 4.2 percent– a ratcheting down from the 4.4 percent CAGR it forecast last year.

For the U.S., revenue is projected to grow even more slowly, increasing from $635 billion in 2016 to $759 billion by 2021, for a CAGR of 3.6 percent. Read More »

Get Ready to Rumble; FCC Launches Net Neutrality Rollback

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Here’s how high tension is already running over the Federal Communications Commission’s proposal to undo it’s own net neutrality order: At Thursday’s open meeting where the commission voted 2-1 to proceed with the first phase of the rollback, with security on high alert over online threats aimed at commissioners, security personnel “manhandled” long-time Capitol Hill reporter John Donnelly and removed him from the building for approaching commissioner Michael O’Reilly in a hallway and attempting to ask him a question outside of an official press conference.

FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn

Tensions are only likely to get higher as the proposal moves forward. This week’s vote kicks off at least a three-month period of pubic comments, during which the commission can expect to be deluged with input, ranging from the substantive to he hysterical. Democrats on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, are vowing “all out war” to prevent any rollback. Read More »

The Net Neutrality Paradox

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One of the more unfortunate wrinkles in the long debate leading up to the Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 Open Internet Order, better known as net neutrality, was its increasingly commercial focus. There were important civil liberties issues at stake, to say nothing of the interplay of engineering and regulation of critical infrastructure and the private ownership of public goods. But much of the public debate boiled down to an argument over streaming — Netflix streaming in particular.

That was due in no small part to the efforts of Netflix founder and CEO, Reed Hastings, who made himself and his company the poster-children of the net neutrality cause by loudly proclaiming Netflix’s oppression at the hands of ISPs looking to impose interconnection fees on the streaming service.

Although net neutrality proponents eagerly embraced Netflix’s cause and Hastings’ pubic advocacy they worked to color the issue as essentially a commercial dispute between different types of service providers, which, paradoxically, is actually an argument against what the FCC did. Disputes between buyers and sellers are not really the FCC’s bailiwick; that’s more a matter for the Federal Trade Commission and the antitrust division of the Justice Department. Read More »

Netflix Ponders Life Without Net Neutrality

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Netflix CEO Reed Hastings did as much as anyone to shape the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules. CEO Reed Hastings’ aggressive public lobbying for what he termed “strong” net neutrality, after Comcast and AT&T successfully forced Netflix to pay for access to their last-mile networks, was largely responsible for putting interconnection arrangements between ISPs and edge providers at the center of the debate and helped persuade former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler to push through reclassification of broadband access as a Title II telecommunications service, which gave the commission jurisdiction over those deals.

Yet, as Republicans in Congress and on the commission sharpen their knives to disembowel Wheeler’s hard-won rules Netflix says it no longer needs the protection.

“Weakening of US net neutrality laws, should that occur, is unlikely to materially affect our domestic margins or service quality because we are now popular enough with consumers to keep our relationships with ISPs stable,” Hastings said in his Q4 letter to shareholders this week.

Translation: we’re too big now even for Comcast to push around, a point Comcast itself obliquely acknowledged in November by integrating Netflix into its flagship X1 set-top box. Read More »

America Exits The World

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For all intents and purposes, Donald J. Trump will assume the presidency in January with no discernable policy agenda. Apart from a few signature flights of fancy, such as building a wall along 1,500 miles of southern border and rounding up 11 million immigrants for summary deportation, his policy pronouncements consisted largely of an ever-shifting farrago of ignorance, indifference, truculence, and personal animus boiled down into 140-character outbursts. As a general matter, we simply do not know what the Trump administration might do.

trumpGiven the enormity his election represents, speculating on the fallout for any particular industry could seem petty, if not beside the point entirely. But for what it’s worth, the media and technology industries may be among the first to feel the impact.

As a near-term matter, Trump said on the campaign trail that he would block AT&T’s pending merger with Time Warner and would look to undo already done media mergers, including Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal. Setting aside the question of whether the Justice Department would have legal grounds to do either (and the perhaps more interesting question of whether a Trump Justice Department would feel constrained by established law and precedent), Trump’s rhetoric could cast a pall over M&A activity, just as the media industry seems poised for another round of it in the wake of AT&T-Time Warner. Read More »

While FCC Dithers, Google Ditches The Box

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To hear the pay-TV industry tell it, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s original proposal to “unlock” the set-top box was essentially a sop to Google, a company many in the industry see as having effectively captured the agency, if not the entire Obama administration, and as coveting the incumbent operators’ position in the TV business.

Those suspicions were only strengthened when Google began offering members of Congress demos of a set-top box that fit remarkably with the sort of navigation device envisioned by Wheeler’s proposal, just days after the proposal was unveiled.

fccwheelergettyoffledeAlarmed, cable operators rushed out its own proposal to “ditch” the set-top box altogether and make their services available, essentially as is, via apps that could run on third-party devices — an idea Google opposed because it would leave the cable operators in control of the user interface and the bundling of channels.

The industry’s move was effective, inasmuch as it forced Wheeler to retreat from his original proposal, and come up with a new plan loosely modeled on the industry’s app-based approach. While Google said it could live with the new proposal, the industry still found much not to like, and an all-out lobby blitz again forced Wheeler to postpone a planned vote on the measure. Read More »

The Coming Wireless Video Wars

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Having dropped $48 billion and change last year to acquire DirecTV, AT&T is now earmarking tens of billions more over the next 3 to 5 years to acquire media companies, according to a report this week by Bloomberg. Citing “people familiar with the plans,” the report said AT&T is targeting acquisitions ranging from $2 billion to $50 billion, with an eye toward “owning some of the content it distributes.”

It likely won’t be distributing it through DirecTV, however, at least not via satellite. According to an earlier Bloomberg report, AT&T will begin phasing out DirecTV’s randallstephensonsatellite platform within the same 3 to 5-year window, with any eye toward making internet streaming its primary TV platform by 2020. The company has lately been lining up carriage deals ahead of its planned launch of its DirecTV Now over-the-top service later this year. And it has been aggressively steering its wireless customers toward DirecTV by bundling unlimited wireless data plans with a DirecTV subscription, which so far has been taken up by some 5 million of its wireless subscribers.

DirecTV Now will also be “zero-rated” for AT&T wireless customers, meaning it won’t count against their monthly data cap. Read More »

Why MVPDs, Studios Won’t Take Yes For An Answer on STBs

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When Federal Communications Chairman Tom Wheeler unveiled his initial proposal to “unlock” the pay-TV set-top box back in January, pay-TV service providers and programmers howled in protest. Operators complained that the proposal, which called for multichannel video program distributors (MVPDs) to make their video feeds, channel listings, and subscriber entitlement data available to third-party device makers as discreet “information flows,” would require a major and expensive re-architecting of their systems. Programmers complained that making their content available directly to device makers with whom the programmers had no contractual arrangement amounted to a de facto compulsory copyright license, which the FCC had no authority to create or enforce.

FCC_buildingBoth threatened to sue.

The two arguments were, in fact, reinforcing. The current carriage agreements TV programmers and distributors have with pay-TV operators are premised in part on pay-TV systems operating in certain ways and not in other ways. Changing how those systems function could cause part of the premise of those licensing agreements to crumble. Read More »

The FCC Chairman’s Tactical Retreat On Set-Top Boxes (Updated)

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After months of intensive lobbying by pay-TV providers and TV programmers, as well as mounting pressure from congress, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler has apparently backed off quite a bit from his original proposal to “unlock the [set-top] box” and is preparing to adopt the broad outlines the industry’s app-based counter-proposal. But that doesn’t mean the struggle for control of the set-top is over.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler gestures at the FCC Net Neutrality hearingIn an ex parte filing with the commission this week, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, along with DirecTV-parent AT&T, pushed back forcefully against elements of what appears to be Wheeler’s new plan to bring greater competition to the market for pay-TV-compatible set-top boxes, as mandated by congress more than a decade ago.

The new plan, as described in general terms in a series of ex parte filings in recent weeks, will apparently require multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) to develop apps that can run on third-party devices but that replicate all of the features of MVPDs’ own services, including making all the operator’s linear and on-demand content available on similar terms.  It will also require MVPDs to make their content searchable by third-party, universal-search applications. Read More »

X1 Marks the Spot for Comcast

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Comcast and Netflix this week confirmed an agreement to incorporate Netflix’s streaming service into Comcast’s X1 video platform, signalling a dramatic shift in what has long been a contentious relationship between the companies.

“Comcast and Netflix have reached an agreement to incorporate Netflix into X1, providing seamless access to the great content offered by both companies,” the two said in a joint statement given to Recode.  “We have much work to do before the service will be available to consumers later this year. We’ll provide more details at that time.”

netflix_blockThat’s a far cry from a few years ago when Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was working overtime to turn Comcast into public enemy number one in the net neutrality fight and Comcast was imposing interconnection fees on Netflix for access to its last-mile network.

But the shift is more likely the result of a change in circumstances than a change of heart. Read More »

Court to ISPs: You Really Are Just Dumb Pipes

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Back when the clamor began to reclassify broadband access as a Title II telecommunications service, in the wake of the DC Circuit Court’s ruling overturning the Federal Communications Commission’s effort to impose net neutrality rules under its Title I authority, there was a lot of grumbling among Verizon’s peers that the telco should have left bad enough alone instead of challenging the commission’s 2010 rules in court.

Though Verizon won the case, largely on technical legal grounds, it poked a hornet’s next that threatened the far-greater sting of reclassification. But now that the same DC Circuit Court has handed down its ruling on reclassification and the FCC’s revised net neutrality rules, many of those grumbling last time are probably wishing they’d followed their own advice.

FCC_buildingNot only did the FCC win the case this time around, but the court majority’s opinion delivers a series of roundhouse blows to most of the ISPs’ claims about the value of their services, if not yet to their market valuations.

In essence, the court concluded that as service providers, ISPs add almost no value beyond basic connectivity. And that goes for wireless as well as fixed-broadband providers.

Apart from their objections on procedural grounds to the FCC’s rulemaking, the ISPs and their trade associations argued they could not fairly be classified as utility-style telecommunications providers because the services they offer consumers include a range of complex, value-adding information-processing functions, such as email, online storage, content caching and DNS lookup. Read More »

Peak TV and the Politics of Plenty

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The formal comment period for the FCC’s controversial set-top box proposal closed this week, after tallying 256,747 submissions. As in any hard-fought rulemaking proceeding these days, most of those were canned comments from “the public” rounded up by PR firms working for parties on all sides of the issue. But it also drew more than 1,000 substantive comments from rights owners, members of the pay-TV industry, technology providers and other agencies of government involved in telecommunications policy, including the White House.

FCC_headquartersI’ve written here before, perhaps excessively, on the relative merits (or lack of them) to the various sides’ positions, so I won’t belabor the debate further. But the latest round of comments revealed another, related issue that bears watching regardless of how the set-top box debate turns out: the very different perspectives on the impact of innovation coming from different corners of the TV business.

The Motion Picture Association of America, representing the 6 major Hollywood studios, has been nearly apoplectic over the FCC’s plan, and its final reply comments — all 50 pages of them — were no exception: Read More »

Disney’s Split UI Personality

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Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger this week said he is “very excited” about the user interface Hulu has designed for its planned virtual-pay-TV service launching next year.

“We’ve seen the interface because we’re partners [in Hulu]” Iger said Wednesday at the MoffettNathanson Media & Communications Summit. “It’s a great interface, a tremendous user experience, and we’re in discussions with them about our channels and about prices.”

hulu_nocbs-1He also used the opportunity to take a swipe at traditional pay-TV operators for the lack of innovation in their UIs over the years.

“I’ve been frustrated over the years by the UI” of cable and satellite TV services Iger said. “Maybe because I’m getting older I don’t have the patience anymore, but we’re all getting more and more spoiled by what technology makes possible,” in terms of surfacing, discovering and accessing content.

According to Iger, consumers raised on digital platforms today simply won’t tolerate any glitches or difficulty in access the content they want when they want it, and the traditional pay-TV industry simply hasn’t kept up with the times. Read More »

In Cable, The Rich Get Richer

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Daniel Frankel, over at FierceCable, noted an interesting pattern in the Q1 data from cable operators this week. All of the vaunted rebound in video subscribers during the period was concentrated among top-tier providers.

Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Charter collectively added 89,000 video subs.

Mid-size operators, however, all experienced continued erosion among video subscribers. Cablevision lost 15,000; Cable One lost 13,000; and Mediacom lost 2,000 across its two operating units.

money_bagsFirst-quarter data on smaller providers, which is compiled by SNL Kagan, is not yet available. But it would be surprising if the pattern there were different from that of the mid-size providers.

In both cases, operators are increasingly making a de facto, if not quite formal, decision not to fight very hard to attract or retain video subscribers because of the high programming costs that come with them and to focus their business primarily on their broadband service.

“The lower end of the market can no longer afford the big bundle; the number of disruptive OTT technologies and vendors are now multiplying rapidly; and the millennial generation has very limited interest in traditional TV viewing,” Cable One CEO Thomas Might told Fierce. “These patterns will inevitably bring an end to the ubiquitous fat bundle, but only slowly and painfully.”

Slowly and painfully perhaps, but the data also suggest it could happen at very different speeds in different markets, depending on the size of the local providers’ national footprint. Read More »