Home screen of Playstation Vue

September 30, 2016
In The Mix

Sink or Slim

Small cable channels succumb to pay-TV’s new interest in fiscal fitness.

Daniel Frankel

In the age of the “skinny bundle” — a reduced package of channels available at a lower monthly rate — the niche cable outlet is facing extinction.

Channels devoted to hobbies and other forms of narrowly focused enthusiasm once proliferated in cable, swelling the channel count into the upper hundreds. But as the pay-TV bill has come under increased scrutiny — and viewers realize they watch only 17 channels anyway — programming companies are weighing the existence of their weaker networks.

In August, Participant Media announced that it is closing its three-year-old Pivot network. NBCUniversal shuttered the video-game-focused G4, and further cuts may follow.

“We — and most of the big media companies — are concentrating on our big brands,” NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke told investors in July. “When you look at our cable networks, we make most of our money in those big channels. We’ve trimmed, and I think you’ll see us and others continue to trim some of the more marginal channels.”

Next-generation pay-TV packages like Sling TV, Sony PlayStation Vue and Hulu’s upcoming live-streaming service are driving this trend, selling smaller bundles of channels for less than 50 dollars.

On the traditional pay-TV side, Verizon says its Custom TV package — which lets FiOS subscribers, to a certain extent, choose the networks they want — is its most popular programming bundle. To date, programming conglomerates have tried to broaden and transform their struggling niche channels rather than cut them outright.

NBCU, for example, leveraged partner Hearst to rebrand and transform the struggling Style into the Esquire Network several years ago. Viacom slowly morphed the Nashville Network into what is now known as Spike. The Fox Reality Channel became Nat Geo Wild.

But for Burke, the era of rebranding is over, and hard cuts are here. “There are just too many channels,” he says, “and people are spending too much on programming channels that are not fully distributed.”

Browser Requirements
The TelevisionAcademy.com sites look and perform best when using a modern browser.

We suggest you use the latest version of any of these browsers:

Chrome
Firefox
Safari


Visiting the site with Internet Explorer or other browsers may not provide the best viewing experience.

Close Window