August 2017

Disney unveiled plans on Aug 8 for Netflix-style streaming services for sports programming from ESPN and Disney movies. It is a striking, multibillion-dollar bid to reposition Disney, the world’s largest entertainment company, for growth and to address worries of cord-cutting in the traditional television business. Disney’s direct-to-consumer services will start in 2018. The first one will offer ESPN programming, including baseball, hockey, tennis and college sports — about 10,000 regional and national events in its first year. By 2019, Disney plans to start a separate entertainment service, which will include Pixar movies, Disney Channel television series and film library content.

For the last two years, Disney has not been to convince investors that ESPN, its longtime growth engine, will keep chugging away — albeit more slowly — even as the network deals with the subscriber erosion that is buffeting the broader cable television business. Its efforts have included paying $1 billion last year for a 33 percent stake in BamTech, which handles streaming for baseball teams and HBO. At the time, Disney said it was working on an ESPN-branded streaming service. On Aug 8, the company said it would pay $1.58 billion for an additional 42 percent stake in BamTech. Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said the acquisition would help his company compete with streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon by introducing a video home base for all things Disney. “The media landscape is increasingly defined by direct relationships between content creators and consumers,” Iger said. “This acquisition and the launch of our direct-to-consumer services mark an entirely new growth strategy for the company.”

One America News CEO Charles Herring blasted the Federal Communications Commission’s recent decision to relax media ownership rules, a move that could pave the way for Sinclair’s $3.9 billion purchase of Tribune Media and allow the broadcast company to extend its reach into more than 70 percent of U.S. homes. “Utilizing the ‘UHF discount,’ which is an antiquated, irrelevant regulation, is really politics at its worst,” Herring said Aug 7, referring to a loophole around a federal cap limiting ownership to 39 percent of the national audience.

While the proposed deal has faced challenges from progressive groups, media consolidation critics and Democratic senators, it’s is also being opposed by conservative media voices, like Herring, who are typically aligned with the president. Christopher Ruddy, a President Donald Trump friend and CEO of conservative Newsmax, in July called for a delay in the government approval process of the Sinclair-Tribune deal. And Glenn Beck’s The Blaze joined several independent media outlets in a June letter to the chairs of the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees. “Regardless of political affiliation, we should agree that robust democracy demands a variety of viewpoints from a myriad of sources; yet, the Sinclair/Tribune merger threatens this core value,” the letter read.

[Commentary] The Justice Department should be taking a hard look at leaks right now; that is a proper role and aim for the department, at least with respect to those leaks that are illegal and damaging to important government interests. Yet the press conference was disturbing nonetheless — less for the reasons so many media figures reached for the smelling salts than because of the not-so-subtle sheen of politics coloring the entire episode. There are big costs to certain types of leaks, and we are paying those costs every day. And for that reason, the current flood of leaks, whatever public purposes they might also be serving, is deeply disturbing and corrosive of important values we expect to presidency to protect.