Disney Chair & CEO Bob Iger admitted that ESPN "could get dropped from some basic cable packages under an unbundling scenario -- but that such an occurrence 'would not be doomsday for us,'" according to Keith Kelly of the N.Y. POST. Iger: "Almost all of our products go through a third party. All those customers are owned by the distributor -- not by us." He added that if ESPN "could get into an arrangement that 'unlocks' consumer information by going direct to the end user, 'it could have tremendous value to us.'" Iger: "The price would obviously have to go up." He added that this is because there "would be fewer customers." Meanwhile, Iger said of the recent suspension of ESPN’s Bill Simmons, "Insubordination did not have anything to do with it." He added that Simmons was taken off the air because he "did not conform to ESPN’s journalistic standards" (N.Y. POST, 10/10).
CLOSE SHAVE: The WALL STREET JOURNAL's Hagey & Ramachandran report the biggest U.S. cable-TV channels "are experiencing a troubling trend: Their reach into American households is shrinking." Nielsen data shows that over the past four years, the top 40 most widely distributed channels in '10 -- "household names like CNN, ESPN and USA -- have lost an average of 3.2 million subscribers, or more than 3% of their distribution." Many consumers "aren't so much cutting the cord as shaving it." Industry execs said that a "growing share" of pay-TV customers "are signing up for smaller, cheaper bundles of channels that cost anywhere from $10 to $50 a month and don’t include popular channels." Execs added that basic plans including "little more than local broadcast stations now make up some 12% of pay-TV subscriptions, up from 8% to 10% a few years ago" (WALL STREET JOURNAL, 10/10).
GIVE & GO: In Boston, Chad Finn writes the "status quo in terms of where we will find NBA broadcasts" over the coming years -- on ESPN and Turner Sports after they re-upped this week -- "is a good thing." ESPN and TNT "do an exceptional job producing the telecasts and ancillary content." But when the deal "goes into effect two seasons beyond this one, this much is also certain: We’ll be wishing for the status quo with our cable bills, too" (BOSTON GLOBE, 10/10).
