Burke’s Right; There Are Too Many Channels

“There are just too many channels,” NBCU chief Steve Burke told analysts during Comcast’s second-quarter conference call on Wednesday.

So, he said, NBCU will shutter or consolidate some of its “marginal channels” just as it has G4 and Style.

Burke didn’t say which of his networks he considered marginal, but he indicated which were not in talking about must-haves for skinny bundles now being assembled by OTT players.

The must-haves include NBC, of course, but also USA, Syfy, Bravo and E!, he said. “We make most of our money in those big channels.”

So, if you work at NBCU’s Chiller, Cloo, Esquire Network or Oxygen, you are forgiven for being a little nervous today.

To Brother Burke, I say amen. He is absolutely right. The cable world is filled with too many “marginal” channels, especially when you consider the powerful currents in TV that are moving away from channels — that is, linear TV — and toward on-demand options like Netflix and Amazon and short-form videos on smartphones.

The glut of these second- or third-rate channels has been a bane to broadcasting, siphoning off viewers, national advertising dollars and, in many cases, programming fees paid by the MVPDs.

Any one of them is inconsequential, but a bunch of them, taken together, tend to smother broadcasting (and major general entertainment cable networks) like kudzu in a hardwood forest. In the end, TV is a zero-sum game. There are just so many TV homes, eyeballs, MVPD programming fees and advertisers.

So, it would be great to see Burke follow through with his promise to dump some networks and other cable programmers to follow his lead.

What cable needs is a good old-fashioned shakeout that rattles not only NBCU, but also Fox, Discovery and especially Viacom where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between the must-haves and the marginals.

And I’m talking about a real shakeout. The tendency among the cable programmers has not been to kill networks, but to rebrand them or replace them with another niche channel of some kind.

The Nashville Network morphed into The National Network and finally into Spike. America’s Talking turned into MSNBC, Noggin became Nick Jr. and Fox Reality Channel is now Nat Geo Wild.

Burke fibbed a bit when he said that Style no longer exists. In fact, it does. In 2013, NBCUniversal brought in Hearst as a partner and, leveraging one of Hearst’s magazines, rebranded the channel as the Esquire Network.

Esquire also serves as an example of the many networks that launched with bright hopes and great ambitions only to devolve into an outlet for off-network shows and a handful of originals that may or may not have anything to do with the network’s original intent.

Esquire now relies heavily on Burn Notice, CSI, NCIS: Los Angeles and Parks and Recreation to get it through the day.

If Burke actually shuts it down, only American Ninja Warriors may be missed and NBCU and the producers will surely be able to find a home elsewhere for it. And what exactly does Ninja Warriors have to do with Esquire magazine?

Let’s not pick on Esquire. It’s a hot house of creativity compared with NBCU’s Cloo (formerly Trio and formerly Sleuth). Today’s schedule comprises NCIS: Los Angeles and only NCIS: Los Angeles from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. Saturday when it switches over to four hours of MacGyver.

Steve, if you are looking to trim, Cloo would be the place to start.

It also cannot help that the low-end cable networks have to compete with the scrappy flock of diginets that have taken flight in the parallel universe of multicasting.

As detailed in our annual report on Wednesday, Weigel, Katz Broadcasting, MGM and others have discovered that there is still an insatiable appetite for channels filled with “classic” TV shows and movies, so what if the demo is as old as the shows.

Cable may have invented the format, but the multicasters seem to be perfecting it.

The most widely distributed diginets at the top of our Top 25 chart are starting to attract general market advertising and the black-oriented Bounce TV is investing heavily in originals with good results.

Five new networks were spawned last year and Tribune, we learned, is talking about hatching another.

(Multicasting, by the way, may be facing a shakeout of its own. The FCC incentive auction will, one of these days, come to an end and when it does hundreds of TV stations will disappear, substantially tightening the supply of channels available for diginets. Weaker diginets will be the odd men out.)

I’m not going to sit here and play TV god and say which cable networks need to go, but if you’re running a network and programming it primarily with mini-marathons of Law & Order and House each day, you might want to be on the lookout for your next job.

I appreciate programming diversity. Unlike Cloo, most networks offer a few quality shows that satisfy the peculiar entertainment tastes or interests of some small groups and fulfill cable’s promised to provide a little something for everyone. They’re keepers.

But the good shows are scattered across too many networks. Perhaps  it’s better to say what cable needs is consolidation rather than a shakeout.

I suppose that the marginal networks continue to plod along like AMC’s zombies because they contribute marginally to their owners’ bottom lines.

Or, it may simply be a numbers game. If you keep pumping out enough original shows on enough channels, chances are you will eventually stumble on a breakout hit that will more than cover the losses from all the shows that never found an audience.

But, at some point, which NBCU apparently has reached, you have to wonder whether the channels are worth the trouble.

You also have to wonder how much longer the MVPDs will be willing to sustain some of the little-watched networks by paying programming fees for them.

The TV side of the MVPD business is under intense pressure from cord-cutters and cord-shavers and the increasing demands from broadcasters for their fair share of the programming dollars.

Burke works for a company whose principal business is operating cable systems. Maybe the folks there have passed the word that something has to be done.

If the cable programmers don’t weed their gardens, the MVPDs may do it for them.

Harry A. Jessell is editor of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or [email protected]. You can read earlier columns here.