mardi 6 novembre 2018
And now, it's HBO that goes dark!
A dispute is going on between an MVPD, Dish Network, and WarnerMedia (now part of AT&T). There is a disagreement over the pricing policy for HBO and its sister channel, Cinemax, both pay TV channels. Consequently, the 1st of November, HBO and Cinemax went dark for the first time in 46 years. Therefore, the 2.5 million households also subscribing to HBO, from among the 13 million Dish Network subscribers, no longer receive their channel. For how long? Who knows? For the time being, no negotiation is in sight.
This situation could be - and has been - interpreted as an indirect consequence of the recent acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T. AT&T owns DirecTV, which is in head-on-competition with the satellite operator Dish Network.
The Department of Justice (DoJ) has always questioned AT&T's acquisition, which could give ATT too much power over TV consumers. Does this situation mean the DoJ is right? Dish Network has testified against the acquisition and could take advantage of this blockage: according to Dish Network, AT&T tries to prevent Dish from distributing WarnerMedia channels (HBO being the most prestigious of them). Every concentration has side effects.
The fight is just beginning. Next episode, the belligerents will meet in the Court of Appeals. HBO subscribers patiently (or not) wait until the end of the blackout... or subscribe to Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. These last two may well end up being the real winners of this battle.
N.B. Dish Network lost 341,000 pay-TV subscribers (third quarter 2018), DirectTV lost 359,000.
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6 commentaires:
We can ask ourselves if this issue between a Network and a content editor will have an impact on the subscriptions for HBO? How long will it last ? Again, the question of holding is important in this case. It's becoming harder to identify who owns what and the difficult negotiations between the different market players.
Interesting opinion on a hot topic. The fact that AT&T move would harm the competition is being validated now as the critics say. Both HBO and Dish claim that they wanted to give the other party an option to extend the contract but the negotiations have failed.
Some claim that Dish’s decision to black out the channels can be calculated and done for publicity making AT&T look bad. What is true, however, is that this controversial series of events is beneficial for platforms like Netflix and Amazon who may not only profit from it now, but also in the future by claiming that “original series will never go off air”. Curious to see how it will play out next!
The HBO blackout seems to be symptomatic of the way negotiations are handled after the recent merger between AT&T and Time Warner.
AT&T might be using its newfound power to muscle out the competition by driving customers who value HBO to switch from Dish to their own subsidiary, DirecTV. However, it also is kind of a weak move because viewers who value HBO might just end up subscribing to HBO directly via their own platform.
Nonetheless, this could be the first alarm signals of a potentially dangerous merger that could considerably reshape and harm the media landscape.
The Department of Justice has appealed the merger which has been deemed "contrary to fundamental economic logic". Let's see how things will turn out.
Negotiations are often difficult... ad This is not the first time that they penalize viewers...As we seen in a other way at the beginning of the year between TF1 and SFR in France.
Our only hope is that Amazon, Netflix, Disney and whoever else start creating enough of their own content that we can tell these giant telecom/cable providers that they loose
Pourrait-on y voir une raison de plus pour que de grandes chaînes payantes comme HBO passent à un modèle similaire à celui de Netflix et de faire de de la vidéo à la demande par abonnement ? Plus de blackout possible avec ce modèle-là !
Je suis vraiment curieuse de voir où veut aller AT&T avec tout ça, est-ce que c'est une stratégie pour préparer l'arrivée d'une plateforme Warner ? Il va falloir se dépêcher dans ce cas, et arrêter de couper tous les accès aux utilisateurs, sinon il n'y aura plus...d'utilisateurs ! Ils seront chez Netflix, Amazon Prime Video ou Disney+ !
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