If Charter exits the TV business, millions of homes are likely to abandon the pay-TV bundle and other, smaller TV providers may follow suit, analysts said.
Late Thursday, all Disney channels, including ESPN and ABC, went dark on Charter Communications Inc.’s CHTR, -1.73% Spectrum cable service as discussions over affiliate renewals hit an impasse — in the middle of the U.S. Open and college football season, and with the NFL regular season kicking off this Thursday night on NBC.
“If Charter can drop ESPN, then any network can be dropped,” analysts at LightShed Partners said in a note Tuesday. “Nobody is safe and the leverage will have permanently shifted to the distributor not because content is no longer king, but because too much content no longer requires the big video bundle and because the video bundle no longer is economically viable for distributors.”
Cable TV system needed a reset Billions of dollars and hours of must-see-TV time are at stake. The conflict boils down to two issues: How much the carrier will pay per channel, and what percentage of a distributor’s footprint will be required to have the channel in their package. Oppenheimer analysts went so far as to deem the dispute a “tipping point” for legacy TV and a defining moment for Charter, the country’s second-largest cable TV provider with 14.7 million subscribers. Media providers like Disney are transitioning to over-the-top TV — streaming content via the internet — but are still expecting cable providers such as Charter to keep paying the same amount for legacy TV, the analysts said.
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