It’s the Comcast cable fire sale! Everything but Bravo must go!

[Kevin M.]

All the other cable nets to be spun off into a separate failing business. 

Interestingly, NBC News and MSNBC would no longer share the same bad journalists, as they’d no longer be bought and paid for by the same rich white men. Comcast plans to keep NBC, Peacock, and Bravo… everything else goes bye bye.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/comcast-cable-networks-msnbc-spinoff-1236066871/?utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin

Kevin M. (RPCV)

[Greg Diener]

So if USA is being sold off, it's safe to say WWE will be moving their catalog in the US from Peacock to Netflix like it will be everywhere else once the Peacock contract runs out.

Greg

[M-D November]

Thoughts:

• Presumably there's a lot of cross-pollination between the NBC News and MSNBC newsrooms. I'm curious to see what this does to both news organizations - will there still be some form of collaboration, or will there be a true firewall?  And will MSNBC and CNBC have to change their names, now that they're not affiliated with the mothership?
• This feels strangely like the Viacom/CBS split from a few years back, and I'm wondering how long it lasts until Kabletown reabsorbs the spinoff.
• Re: Greg's point about the WWE deal - one could make the argument that, if the international transition to Netflix goes well, the writing is ultimately on the wall for all domestic WWE programming, but I know there's still some time left on the Peacock deal, plus they just signed a new rights agreement for Smackdown and 4x specials a year on NBC, so nothing's going to happen right away.  Plus, WWE and the USA Network have been joined at the hip for such a long time (save for a cup of coffee in the 'aughts) that I have a hard time believing that TKO would ever pull all programming from USA, but as they say, anything can happen in the WWE.

[Mark Jeffries]

And it should be emphasized that Roberts will still be running the new company, so that basically it's keeping the reduced profits from the cable networks from affecting everything else at NBCU and Kabletown. Nothing's being sold to another entity yet, and outside of Byron Allen, frankly who would?

Mark Jeffries

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[Tom Wolper]

To the first point, the letters in a brand might just be letters nowadays. The MS in MSNBC came from the original investing partner Microsoft and they got out of the channel decades ago.

--

[PGage]

Also, as some of those being spun out have emphasized, the profits still made by MSNBC and CNBC have for some years now not been reinvested in the cable businesses; now presumably, they will be, including possibly acquiring more cable properties, perhaps under valued in the current climate. I’m not sure that a company of unwanted toys really has a viable sustainable financial future, but could be interesting to see how this plays out. It’s not impossible that in the aftermath of all the mergers to come, there might be some other legacy news operations that could be scooped up relatively cheaply by the “SpinCo” - we might have something like a MSNBCBS News channel on our hands in a couple of years.

We cut the cord on actual cable some years ago, and if ESPN truly goes streaming, I may cut the virtual cable cord too and get rid of my YouTube TV subscription once the NBA is off TNT, As I can’t think of anything besides Jeopardy, that I would want to watch that I would still need access to cable. However, while they are mostly over 40, I still know a lot of people who consume most of their television from cable/broadcast, and it’s hard to imagine what must be tens of millions of Americans giving up cable completely anytime soon. It’s a scaled down business to be sure, but seems like it could still be profitable? 

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