What do Seth Meyers’ “Late Night” band and the MTV News archives have in common? More than you might think.
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Both are among some of the tiny business cuts that have been making their way through the media industry in recent weeks as companies like NBCUniversal, Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery try to winnow down costs while their main flows of revenue — cash from advertising and distribution — grow less reliable.
Most late-night shows have a band — one of the de rigueur elements that have been in place since Johnny Carson held sway with Doc Severinsen. But Meyers’ 12:30 a.m. program on NBC will, starting this fall, no longer boast one, owing to what has been described as “budget cuts.” MTV is a shadow of the cultural behemoth it was in the 1980s and 1990s, but fans could get a taste of its power by surveying the archives of MTV News — until recently. Paramount Global has scaled back many of its properties’ digital assets in recent weeks, working instead on strategies that push people to its subscription streaming services. Paramount also pulled the “Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” video archives it once made available on Comedy Central’s website.
Such maneuvers show some of the biggest purveyors of entertainment sweating really small stuff. Heck, Meyers’ “8G Band” doesn’t even have a regular drummer.
Are such antics the equivalent of rummaging under couch cushions for quarters and dimes? Maybe so. There are few alternatives for companies that still have a pressing need to spend billions on creating new programming to keep people subscribing to (or at the very least sampling) nascent streaming hubs even as the audience fragmentation caused by such activity reduces the guaranteed flows of cash once easily secured from Madison Avenue and cable-company alliances.
To be sure, removing a cache of beloved late-night broadcasts or cutting back on musical interludes in NBC’s wee hours schedule won’t spur an immediate riot. These elements aren’t media-business must-haves. They are, however, features that TV fans have long expected to be available.
Other “nice-to-haves” have been falling by the wayside. The original appeal of streaming hubs like Netflix, HBO (before it became Max), and Hulu is that subscribers could avoid commercials entirely. Even those who had to take a cheaper ad-supported tier didn’t have to wade through the sheer glut of ads baked into the linear-TV experience. Now there’s a growing sense that the days of commercial-free binge-watching are coming to a close , with most companies offering ad-supported tiers that are notably cheaper than commercial-free counterparts. Over time, one can expect the monthly subscription rate of most streamers to hike further, and, if linear TV is any guide, for more ads to show up during breaks, no matter the audience’s preference.
Gone too, in recent months, is the intriguing notion that a subscription to a specific streaming site grants exclusive access to any and every piece of content produced by the owner. You can’t watch “Westworld” on Max, for example, because parent company Warner Bros. Discovery decided to monetize that program by making it available to other parties for use in FAST channels and the like. Disney shares “Grey’s Anatomy” with Netflix because the long-running medical drama is popular there and brings in a healthy licensing fee.
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In the current climate, the aforementioned expectations are luxuries.
More things may become so in the not-too-distant future. The simple fact is that Disney, NBC, Warner, Fox and Paramount are fast transforming themselves from purveyors of mass entertainment to no-frills distributors of content. As old-school entertainment companies take more direct control of their relationships with viewers through streaming, they are increasingly picking up the mind-set of the cable and satellite distributors whose subscriber base once meant everything. If current trends continue, a day may come when the bulk of ESPN’s subscriber base is controlled by Disney itself, rather than Comcast, Charter or DirecTV.
As that becomes more of the case, the media companies are thinking less about generating mass impressions and more about cultivating direct-to-consumer relationships and tamping down churn. The mission is moving from “How many people will watch this at once?” to “How many subscriptions will I sell if I do this?”
Clearly ,that has already changing the calculus of how these companies operate. The absence of a band on NBC’s “Late Night” likely won’t affect subscription growth at Peacock, and moving Comedy Central clips behind a Paramount+ paywall will probably aid the cause.
The risk, of course, is that Disney, NBC and the rest start to be perceived as utilities — much like the cable and satellite companies are today. NBC, after all, is the purveyor of “Sunday Night Football” and “Saturday Night Live.” Comcast, its owner, sends you a bill each month and, judging by many past public outcries, can be challenging to communicate with when it comes to hiccups in service.
The little “nice-to-haves” may not make a lot of money, but they do play a role in keeping the halo shining around the old-school brands. Warner Bros. Discovery, or the current NBC or Paramount, or even Disney might soon be viewed as just like “the cable company” if the mindset about subscriptions-at-all-costs continues to harden.
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