“We looked at the S&P 500 trying to find companies that consistently delivered returns like that and it was less than 10 — basically no other sectors could claim that kind of return,” Juenger told Variety in a rare interview.
monthly carriage fees paid out by MVPDs to channel owners — surpassed the revenue those channels generated from advertising sales for the largest cable brands. That made entertainment companies even more focused on protecting those fees, the profit engine that has been the biggest driver of showbiz earnings across the sector.
“While all the consumer research suggested that there was real demand at sub-$40 prices, the consolidation of the media sector, which re-created big TV bundles, and the high annual escalation of programming costs worked in tandem [in the past few years] to create a massively unprofitable business with increasingly limited consumer demand,” MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson wrote July 13 in a note on digital MVPDs.
One of the biggest and swiftest shifts in the media economy in recent years has been the reevaluation of the intrinsic value of cable channels. USA Network has been more profitable for NBCUniversal than has NBC. The same is true, exponentially, for ESPN and ABC. By the mid-1990s, launching TNT was seen as a smarter business move by Ted Turner than buying CBS in 1985, as he tried to do.