Format changes, flankers, and the state of the industry today

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Thu, 4 Nov 2021 14:31:03 -0400, "Ron" <obrienron2@gmail.com> said:

>>>> Is this what the radio industry has come to?  

> Or is it the state of (and reality of) advertising?

That certainly has a lot to do with what's happened to pretty much all
linear media.

As I said the other day, I'm not listening to broadcast radio all that
much, and I'm watching TV even less, but I have noticed that the TV
advertising that I do see is dominated by the lowest of low-rent
advertisers.  The other day I was watching the Skate America
figure-skating competition, which used to get decent audiences, and
the most noticeable advertisers were a quack memory nostrums and an
adult-diaper delivery service.  Oh, and of course the inevitable
asbestos ambulance-chasers.  This probably goes a long way to explain
why Comcast is shutting down NBCSN at the end of the year.

I think it's pretty clear that most sports now figure they can extract
more money from a subscription-only streaming model, even for live
events, than they can from the sort of advertisers left trying to
reach octogenarians via linear TV advertising.  Comcast presumably
makes enough from the Olympics to keep that on broadcast for some
years to come, but sports with multiple competitions in a year are not
going to be seen on that platform with any reliability.

(Killing off NBCSN at least helps Comcast deal with their
long-standing problem of "which of NBC's five different sports
streaming sites will have the coverage of event X", because there will
soon only be four of them.)

-GAWollman