COMMENTARY

All Live TV News on Streaming? I Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet

• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, 5 hours ago

Know this. If Warner Bros. Discovery puts all live CNN on streamer Max -- and gets away with it -- all hell will break loose, in an environment where there is already lots of heat.

For competitive reasons, TV Watch believes that NBC will test the waters further by placing all of MSNBC on Peacock. NBC already airs on-demand MSNBC content and one live show, “Morning Joe," on Peacock.

NBC also has NBC News Now content on Peacock. Fox News Channel is also expected to become a bigger part of streamer Fox Nation.

Cable TV news has been a major part of cable TV viewership -- along with sports.

With regard to the latter, now add in that ESPN+ might be spun off as a separate company, which means it is only a matter of time before live linear ESPN becomes a part of that platform. 

This will make those remaining legacy pay TV platforms -- cable, satellite, telco, and virtual -- feel the tremors of a coming earthquake, something that has been expected for some time.

Why hasn't this been done before? Existing exclusivity deals with distribution. To date, no legacy live, linear cable TV news networks are part of any streaming service. 

Legacy pay TV platforms -- cable, satellite, telco, and virtual services -- would put their foot down and say this voids contracts and their exclusive TV news content in their markets. 

So what are Warner Bros Discovery and CNN in talks about? Probably compensation. If those cable operators and the like can get paid something to give up all or part of their exclusivity -- either through an ad-share agreement or a streaming distribution revenue-share arrangement -- they will, in theory, buy in.

Still, the negotiation and talks will bring up the obvious -- a bigger wave of massive disruption is coming to the legacy pay TV system and cannot be stopped. In that regard, your friendly cable operator might want to take advantage of a revenue-share offer while it transitions to other businesses.

Comcast and Charter are thinking along these lines. They are now working together on a nascent streaming platform, based on the Xumo platform -- a Roku, Amazon Fire TV wannabe -- announced last November.

What remains? Take live news and live sports from cable systems and you're left with lots of entertainment -- scripted and unscripted -- that is already available on streaming platforms. Guess what happens to those steep cord-cutting numbers? Think free fall.

Major cable linear TV networks brands on media companies' direct-to-consumer (D2C) platforms will be big breaking news for consumers.