To get to know our readers a little better, Next TV recently sent a survey out to a small cross-section of you, asking a series of delicate financial questions and making numerous probing inquiries about your personal lifestyle habits.
We don't want to offend you any more than we already have, but frankly, your extreme level of cognitive dissonance shocked us.
According to your responses, you're absolutely loaded with cash, and you could retire young almost any day now. But you're gravely concerned about the trajectory of the technology-media-telecom industries. You feel like something bad could happen at any minute. And you can't wait for it.
And you say you like "long walks on the beach"and "sunsets," and that your turnoffs are "negative people."
Well, baby, our most popular stories from 2023 were about bankruptcies, dying linear industries, carriage blackouts, freeloaders and overpayments.
Funny thing, in the same Zoom meeting that we decided to do the reader survey, we also tried to cook up a new Next TV slogan, a la Fox News' 1990s-era catchphrase, "We report, you decide." We almost went with, "We bate, you click!"
We're going to keep working on that. But here are the 10 most widely read Next TV stories from the last 12 months.
How Ready Is Charter To Let Disney and ESPN Walk? It Plans To Funnel Blacked-Out ‘Monday Night Football’ Fans to Fubo and YouTube TV
September 4, 2023
On the Thursday night during which the 2023 college football season kicked off with an ESPN presentation of Utah upsetting Florida, the World Wide Leader and the rest of the Disney-owned networks were removed from over 14.7 million Charter Spectrum TV homes.
We speculated -- rightly, as it turned out -- that this particular carriage war might be a little different.
Also read: Disney and Charter Patch Up ‘Broken’ Pay TV Model, Sign Distribution Agreement
Nearly 10% of Fox News Viewers Say They're Watching the Network Less Following the Dominion Lawsuit Disclosures
March 16, 2023
Just before Fox News reached a $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, and just prior to its sacking of Tucker Carlson, research company Maru Group released findings suggesting all that misinformation had caught up with the cable news leader.
Do the Collapse: Dish Becomes the Latest Major Pay TV Operator to Accelerate to Double-Digit Cord-Cutting Rate (Charts of the Day)
May 8, 2023
Every pay TV operator save for Fubo lost subscribers in the first quarter, and when Next TV calculated YoY declines for each cable, satellite, telco and vMVPD company, readers responded.
It's On: Bally Sports RSNs Headed for Bankruptcy
January 25, 2023
Heavily indebted and fighting the effects of cord cutting, Sinclair-owned regional sports networks subsidiary Diamond Sports Groups indicated that it was going to stop in for a quick Chapter 11 restructuring ... renegotiate some team deals, leverage some streaming rights.
It'd be over before we knew it.
Entering the last week of December, Diamond still hasn't figured out a restructuring plan.
YouTube Has Around 1.5 Million ‘NFL Sunday Ticket’ Subscribers, Will Lose Over $1.2 Billion This Season: Morgan Stanley
October 25, 2023
While they're publicly traded, the Silicon Valley giants are notoriously opaque about the data for their respective media businesses.
With Google/YouTube at the beginning of a multiyear relationship with the NFL, paying it $2.5 billion a season for its "Sunday Ticket" out-of-market games package, any Wall Street-spawned insight for market performance to date would be jumped on by readers.
And that they did when Morgan Stanley released a "NFL Sunday Ticket" performance projections through 2029.
DirecTV Loses Estimated 400,000 Subs in Q2 ... With Monster Nexstar Blackout Lingering and the Start of the NFL Season Looming
August 15, 2023
The massive Nexstar station blackout on DirecTV pay TV platforms quietly drug on all summer. But as the 2023 football season began to ramp up, so did urgency to resolve the broadcast retransmission impasse.
Readership for this story was also fueled by the quarterly subscriber estimation, which came courtesy of Leichtman Research Group. Since DirecTV was spun off from AT&T back in 2021, it has been managed by private equity and we don't any longer get to see how many people have quit the service.
No More Free Lunch! Comcast Cable Officially Boots Peacock Freeloaders
June 26, 2023
As we recall, Comcast didn't particularly like this headline.
And a case could definitely be made that the millions of Xfinity TV users who received Peacock Premium with their pay TV service definitely weren't "freeloaders." Just look at their monthly bills!
But it was kind of notable when when Comcast and NBCUniversal removed Peacock as a no-additional-cost feature these linear video customers were receiving as part of their cable TV package.
YouTube's 'NFL Sunday Ticket' ... And the Desperate Drive to Convert Around 6 Million Subscribers
August 20, 2023
Again, with Google not saying much about the sales uptake for its pricey "NFL Sunday Ticket" package, aggregated speculation about how it was doing in the marketplace was something Next TV readers were definitely here for.
Yes, We Can Now Safely Call Amazon's Russo Bros. Spy Thriller 'Citadel' a $300 Million Disaster
June 8, 2023
Suffice it to say that Amazon wasn't too happy with some of Next TV's headline choices this year, either. And as you can see from the italic-set story-ad at the bottom of the post, company reps staunchly rejected our dismissal of their $300 million Russo Bros. spy thriller Citadel as a "disaster."
How could this movie be a disaster, an Amazon rep asked us, if it's the second best performing international title in Amazon video history?
Our answer: For $300 million, we'll need to see some actual metrics. We're tough but fair!
Roku's Chris Larson: ‘We Spend Roughly $1 Billion a Year on R&D. It's Taken Us 15 Years to Get Here. To Say You're Going to Spend $200 Million and Catch That in 6 Months Is a Lot of Bravado’
August 28, 2023
Yeah ... as we build this end-of-year post, a theme is definitely emerging.
You guessed it! Roku absolutely hated the headline to this Q&A with their top smart TV strategy guy, Chris Larson, who had migrated over from TCL to lead Roku's new self-branded TV efforts.
As we recall, the headline was a direct quote. As for the rest of the quotes in this article, we thought Larson did an excellent job of explaining the broad strokes of a key part of the video business.
