Are You Ready For More Football?

Recognizing the rating success that NBC has gotten from Sunday Night Football, CBS has shelled out additional dollars to add Thursday Night games to the prime time window.  Despite the success of its current line-up, most notably The Big Bang Theory, CBS believes football generates higher revenues and better revenues.  So moving the Big Bang to another night seems the best next step.

As a football fan, I love Sunday afternoon for football and I am lukewarm about Sunday Night and Monday Night games given how late they start and end.  But it is unlikely to believe that these night games would ever start for the east as early as 7pm.  So adding another weeknight of football only dilutes the total enjoyment of Sunday football. 

Will I watch, it depends.  Most likely only when my team is scheduled to play.  Where I love watching all the action of all the football games on a Sunday afternoon, the lone Thursday and Monday game are simply outliers to the main action.  Yes dollars over the fan always comes first.  Fans will watch but expect to hear more grumbling. 

Radio Shack Runs Super Bowl Ad, Then Closes Stores

Radio Shack decided to create a memorable and most likely expensive ad, given the talent appearing in the commercial, and to run it in the Super Bowl.  Can you say expensive?  So how do you follow up your plans to take the 80's back and show the world the new Radio Shack?



Answer, you decide to close a ton of stores.  "According to people familiar with the matter, RadioShack is planning to close around 500 locations in the coming months. It isn't clear which of RadioShack's roughly 4,300 stores will be closed and when exactly the closings will begin."  Sure your ad gets a lot of plays, but you created a PR nightmare.  The sound of cash being flushed down the toilet.  Rather than tell the country that you are embracing change, you go 360 on us. 

Truthfully, what would have made a great companion piece in the news would have been how you have an aggressive plan to revamp your stores to reflect a new approach, not close them.  How does that align with your ad?  Is operations not talking to marketing?  Heck, I would have closed out your ad with a rebranding of Radio Shack to something like "The Shack".   I would have started to redecorate the stores and refresh the facade.  It would have been a cohesive, integrated attempt to both communicate to the world of your new approach and to actually do what you say.  But closing the store simply tells the world that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. 

Take the 80's back, you may just have to start planting daisies to soon become another footnote like Circuit City, Highlands, The Wiz, and many other electronic companies that are no longer with us.  But so ironic that you spent so much money on an ad only to announce many store closures.  Dumb!

Microsoft Makes Multiple Leadership Changes

When Steve Ballmer announced last year his plans to retire as CEO of Microsoft, many wondered who would be named successor to the crown.  With that formal announcement today, we have learned that there were multiple leadership changes to be made.  First, that Satya Nadella is now the new CEO, second that Bill Gates was resigning as Chairman and one of Microsoft's current board members, John Thompson, would take that role.  And that Bill Gates would have a new title as technology advisor.  Steve Ballmer will remain on the board of directors.  Certainly bigger changes then many expected.

So what does this change mean?  With Thompson as the new Chairman and Nadella as the new CEO, will Microsoft take a new direction?  Will Microsoft devote more attention to hardware or embrace a larger software in the cloud focus?  Surely the hope is that this new leadership will invigorate the company and create more technological innovation than has been seen. 

Time Warner Cable Loses Signal, Bigger Push To Sell

Time Warner Cable saw a slew of subscriber drops when it dropped the CBS signal when its contract expired.  Their Southern California system dropped the ball again when it lost the Fox signal during the Super Bowl for about an hour.  Certainly not a good way to try and regain consumer trust.  Can you say bad timing?

And it seems Charter is not going away, either.  Reports are surfacing that Charter will indeed up their bid for Time Warner Cable.  Whether Comcast will be a part of these dealings or help Charter to get the NY and New England systems remains to be seen.  One wonders what other troubles lay ahead for Time Warner Cable. 

Are You Ready For The Big Game?

Of course that game is this weekends' Super Bowl and while a good bit of the action will be on the field, more seems to be riding off the field.  With skyhigh advertising costs to appear on the screen, big budgets to produce the most creative eyecatching mini-epics, and the pr to create in advance the social buzz, the game itself almost becomes an afterthought. 

The telecast is a spectacle from pre-game to post.  Where fashion watchers hype the red carpet before each and every award show, sports hypes the emotion, tension, and intrigue to raise our interest in the game.  And with the advertising in it, the Super Bowl attracts fans and non fans alike, giving us all something to watch and talk about.  In fact, it is a hard time to watch alone.  If not with friends at a party, or at a bar or restaurant, at least with social media to share the hype. 

And even cord cutters can watch the game.  While you may not have a cable or broadcast antenna, you can still find online streams to catch the action.  And if not, another reason to leave your front door and immerse yourself in the frenzy.  Whether your interest is in the football game itself, the ads, the social camaraderie, or all of the above, it is a spectacle to enjoy.  So, are you ready for the big game?  I know I am. 

Google Decides To Sell its Moto

It looks like Google has second guessed itself.  When it bought Motorola Mobility a couple years ago for $12.5 billion dollars, their thought must have been to create a competitive phone product to compete with Apple.  But also selling its Android operating software to other phone companies, the idea of its own phone brand created many conflicts of interest.  So Google has chosen to reverse its course, selling Motorola Mobility to Lenova for a measly $2.9 billion dollars.  A little over a year ago, Google sold the Motorola Mobility division that makes the cable boxes to Arris for about $2 billion dollars.  So adding that gain, it is almost an $8 billion dollar loss in only 2 years, although likely a drop in the bucket for Google. 

Obviously Google continues to put more effort into its other activities, including the growth plans for Google Glass.  But the decision to sell the phone hardware business clearly demonstrates a different direction for Google, not as a phone manufacturer, but as the brains behind every other phone maker.  A small misstep for Google that they recognized quickly and can now keep moving forward. 

Comcast and U-Verse Ask, What Cord-Cutting?

Has Comcast and AT&T U-Verse discovered the secret sauce to slowing down or perhaps even reversing cord cutting?  Well in each of their quarterly financials, both have reported increases in video subscriptions.  So while Time Warner Cable has lost customers, these two have added them.  Comcast reported an net add of over 40,000 video subscribers on the quarter, while "AT&T added 194,000 U-verse TV subs in the fourth quarter and 924,000 for all of 2013, extending its TV total to 5.5 million."  That is a huge annual increase.

As both Comcast and TWC are wired franchises that don't overlap, Comcast could not directly gain from Time Warner Cable's misfortune, but AT&T most likely did.  Content drop and poor service are certainly to blame.  For Comcast, Brian Roberts has credited the investment in the infrastructure.  How that encourages new customers to come in, I don't know, but perhaps it most likely kept current customers from deserting. 

AT&T faces issue of customers dropping wired telephone service, losing more than 800,000 telephone customers in the quarter.  While some switched to U-Verse, other simply left.  But AT&T also added over 800,000 wireless customers.  Having a video, broadband, and wireless platform should certainly continue to help AT&T to grow total subscribers. 

Are we seeing the making of a trend and is cord cutting slowing down or is this a blip that will continue to occur as cable companies annually raise their monthly cable subscription fees? Will a Supreme Court ruling later in the year over the Aereo business model affect them or is the infrastructure so strong that it can offer added value that keeps customers from switching off their cable subscription?  For now at least, Comcast and AT&T feel they are beating back the cord cutting phenomenon. 

Live From ..., Ratings Are Up

The savior of linear television, besides folks who simply like to watch what ever is on the tube, continues to be Live Television.  It causes appointment TV where viewers plan their time to be near the TV set to watch.  And the success of live TV can be seen as ratings continue to rise for spectaculars like The Sound of Music to Football games and to last Sunday's Grammy Awards program.  "The Grammy Awards telecast remains second only to the Academy Awards in terms of popularity, with Sunday’s show on CBS drawing a big 28.51 million viewers — up slightly from last year’s 28.38 million and the second largest audience in the last 21 years."

No doubt, I would expect more and more networks to augment their line-ups with special event live shows.  NBC has tried it already with live showing of 30 Rock and Fox has had success with American Idol.  Keeping viewers tuned to the channel also benefits the networks advertising abilities.  More viewers, more dollars charged, more revenue coming in.  But it is clear that TV needs more live programming also to keep cord cutters from growing more rapidly. 

Once networks build out an authenticated TV Everywhere experience that lets their networks get enjoyed on every screen, ratings growth could skyrocket.  So congrats on the ratings success; Live television continues to demonstrate the power that linear networks bring to the public. 

ESPN Driving Digital Content To Thwart Cord Cutting

Today's Wall Street Journal offers an in-depth piece on ESPN's strategic approach to the digital landscape.  Cutting to the chase, they recognized that cable revenue was at stake with the rise of streaming video on the web.  And no matter how much you raise your license fees to cover drops in cable subscription, eventually, cord cutting would impact its business.  The result, a digital network/app for cable authenticated customers, called WatchESPN.  "ESPN collects money for the app from pay-TV providers such as cable companies, which pay for the right to offer it to their customers. For ESPN, a second revenue stream comes from advertising on the app. "

Talk about a great extension of its linear channels.  An online app that cable operators pay a monthly license fee to ESPN and then market to its cable subscribers as an extension of their cable service.  And ESPN gets both some subscription revenue and advertising revenue from their digital business. 

Sports fans, especially ESPN fans, are most likely not the households dropping their cable subscriptions.  Consumers that are cord cutting tend to find non-sports content through other platforms.  So ESPN may be seeing loss of subscriber revenue because consumers are cutting off their cable subscriptions, but their ratings remain unchanged as their viewers are not the ones cutting the cord.  Ratings though could eventually drop as the cost of cable service eventually drives even the ardent sports fan away from cable.

For now, ESPN has created a smart digital business that retains cable subscribers and keeps cable operators happy while building out an ESPN digital business that could one day become a standalone subscription OTT network.  "ESPN is talking to broadband providers about other Internet products, such as an ultra-high-definition version of its TV channels that would be offered only to people who upgrade to faster tiers of broadband. "  ESPN seems to have found a way to straddle the cable and digital business; hopefully, they can keep their balance as consumers continue to adapt to a digital world.