On Tuesday, popular telecommunications company Comcast confirmed it would follow through with a dramatic move. proposal it was made to investors last month: officially sell almost all of its cable TV properties as part of a $7 billion deal. The purge will affect much of Comcast’s overall media portfolio, keeping only the core NBCUniversal brand (home to NBC, Peacock, Telemundo and Universal) and the Bravo reality TV empire. Meanwhile, over the course of a year, CNBC, E!, Fandango, Golf Channel, MSNBC, Oxygen, Rotten Tomatoes, Syfy and USA will all be separated from 30 Rock, combined into a publicly traded company with the working title ” SpinCo”, and supervised by Mark Lazarus, Chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group.

Naturally, the atmosphere is bad within the media company. Anchors at CNBC – which has suffered several rounds of layoffs over the past year – made dark jokes about the situation on air Wednesday as an inside source told The Hollywood Reporter that the mood was “bored, but probably fine.” (A staff meeting with Lazarus the next day seemed to calm some nerves.) Things were even more nervous at MSNBC, with insiders telling the media that workers are “depressed” and “in panic“, due to continued uncertainty over how MSNBC will actually sever its close ties with NBC — and whether it may even have to change its name. The troubled network was already opening up drop in post-election ratings And new reaction from the viewer At Morning Joe co-hosts recent make-out and kissing session with Donald Trump when more bad news arrives: that of Lachlan Cartwright compared to the Ankler about a looming global host shakeup that will even see Rachel Maddow earn a sweeter salary.

Another unknown is how SpinCo should operate in the shrinking cable landscape once separated from the still-powerful NBC brand. With Comcast retaining the streamer Peacock reinvigoratedSpinCo’s TV brands will need to find an ideal streaming situation to maintain a consistent audience. They will also have to negotiate their broadcast rates with network television distributors, while lacking the power and advantages attached to the NBC name: sports broadcasting rights, revenue support from Comcast and audience brand loyalty to a time of incessant channel cuts. . Lucas Shaw of Bloomberg reports that SpinCo “explore acquiring other cable channels and creating its own streaming services”, with a view to expanding to include “channels specializing in documentaries or food-related shows”.

There are still other headwinds for SpinCo, including the new Donald Trump administration, whose ranks will likely include FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr as well as president of the entire regulatory body. Carr has already publicly fumed about NBC with Kamala Harris on Saturday evening live during the electoral cycle, and Trump sued CBS last month based on conspiratorial claims that 60 minutes made “edits” favorable to Harris for the final edit of his interview. Any future merger/acquisition of SpinCo will require federal approval, and we have known since the first Trump administration that his team do not hesitate to punish the cable channels he hates, like CNN and, yes, MSNBC.

We all know that traditional television has been in decline for decades, for a multitude of obvious reasons. But the NBC/SpinCo situation may be representative of an even darker media trend: powerful corporations choose to accelerate the devaluation of the cable industry. As veteran television journalist Josef Adalian noted in Vulture: “(By) essentially abandoning originals and getting rid of executives who previously worked on marketing and programming for those channels, NBCU and others placed their cable holdings in hospice years before having to make this transition.”

As I noted in September, The fight between Disney and DirecTV The issue of distribution fees and channel packaging has become so intense that fights and insults have spilled over into every public forum imaginable. (The two companies quickly reached an agreement mid-month that was relatively favorable to DirecTV; the latter company, however, suffered a recent setback, when bondholders rejected his proposal to acquire another satellite provider Dish.) Over the summer, Paramount, on the gritty road to this acquisition of Skydancecleaned the Internet of old clips from his IP brand (TV Land, etc.) then closed its television studio, after to write the value of its $6 billion cable unit; its iconic Comedy Central and MTV properties suffered on air because “ghost networks“, with repetitive programs of familiar reruns and long-running titles that remain somewhat viable (The daily show with Jon Stewart, South Park).

For now, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav might be the only one to see the coming years as a good time for this type of media, saying that Donald Trump and a Republican Congress could preside over a An era favorable to “consolidation” for large companies. But does Zaslav really want to buy more TVs? After merging Warner and Discovery in 2022, after having thrown away countless beloved properties of this megaportfolio, after thinking voluntarily dissolve your own business—Zaslav seems quite happy to sell little bits of the business both, including (you guessed it) international TV channels, like All3Media and TVN. He’s not selling out CNN yet, even though the famous anchor faces his own problems. income problems And prosecution of Trump allies.

The trends are clear: Cable TV isn’t recovering anytime soon, and its stakeholders seem eager to abandon everything, perhaps sooner rather than later. Combine that with a media-hostile (and TV-addicted) Trump administration, and it seems pretty clear what 2025 could bring: the demise of liberal television as we know it. But at least you can enjoy all this Netflix shit.

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