> TV networks in the US are a living proof that, with enough marketing spend and a pinch of confusion in the offer structure, you can sell people on anything. Half the time you can just offer sportsball access and people will switch.
The cratering market values say otherwise. Few people under 40 even care about “TV”, and live sports distribution contracts (and the associated gambling) are the only thing holding it up.
I too used to think TV is dead and no one is paying for cable anymore, but every now and then I keep hearing it's still alive and well, and that's always in association with some big sportsball events; I can believe that their customers nowadays are almost entirely sports fans, but then the pull they have with that segment is still strong. In my mind, the term "ESPN" registers as "something to dangle in front of US customers to get them to buy some TV plan".
False, the majority of under 40 are still watching "TV" but just through intertube streaming. netflix, apple TV, amazon, and so on, all except apple have ads too.
The post I responded to mentioned TV networks, not TV. In a thread discussing over the air TV, I took that to mean linear programming sold by CBS (soon to be Skydance), NBC (Comcast), ABC (Disney), and Fox (also Disney, I think), and the CW (Nexstar).
The crux of the matter being that even if OTA channels didn’t track people’s location, it wouldn’t matter since OTA itself going the way of the dodo.
Fox TV stations are now Fox Corp, aka "New Fox", the more direct successor to News Corp. Disney bought most (but not all) of News Corp's TV studio and film studio but knew it couldn't get past the FCC if it bought the TV stations (especially the sports stations).
Some of it is still linear like broadcast, if that's your personal distinction. Pluto, for instance, has a surprisingly large audience. The return of linear TV is also a big buzzword in streaming today with a lot of the majors experimenting with or already reintegrating linear TV options (partly because services like Pluto proved it out, partly because some of the streamers realized linear again is the ultimate endgame of Netflix-like binge watching and YouTube-like autoplay and want to skip the intermediate steps and return to the original thing).
Yes, there definitely is linear programming over the Internet, both free and paid.
We've finally come full circle: Linear broadcast TV -> TiVo (finally, no more missed episodes!) -> VOD, i.e. Netflix, Max, Hulu etc. (why linear broadcast everything to everyone if we can just OTT stream everything individually?) -> FAST, i.e. Pluto TV etc.
The cratering market values say otherwise. Few people under 40 even care about “TV”, and live sports distribution contracts (and the associated gambling) are the only thing holding it up.