Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Tuesday, November 22nd, 2022

YouTube TV customers want to sue Disney for jacking up their virtual TV prices

Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Monday, November 21st, 2022.

PROGRAMMING NOTE
Just a reminder, tomorrow (Wednesday) will be the last day this week for the newsletter. I'll be back next Monday with plenty of post-holiday news, although I might sneak in a brief holiday edition of the newsletter if breaking news requires it.

Also, thanks to all of you who subscribed to the newsletter in the past 24 hours. Yesterday brought the largest number of new free and paid subscriptions in a 24-hour period since I launched this newsletter and I also appreciate all of the great feedback as well. 

YOUTUBE TV CUSTOMERS SUE DISNEY FOR JACKING UP VIRTUAL TV PRICES
I have written extensively in this newsletter about some of the consumer-unfriendly practices that help prop up the bottom lines of the major media companies at the expense of their customers. And one of the worst of them are the "most favorite nation" clauses in carriage agreements between vMVPD operators. That clause forces every MVPD and vMVPD to pay the same carriage fee for TV channels. Which means that every time one company agrees to a higher price, it inevitably pushes up the costs to every other vMVPD and MVPD in the industry. That practice - combined with forced bundling that combines every channel owned by a media company into one take-or-leave-it package - means the price consumers pay for their favorite cable, satellite TV or vMVPD service continues to climb.

A lawsuit filed by some unhappy subscribers to Google's YouTube TV argues that their monthly subscriber costs have risen at an unnatural rate because of the way Disney has manipulated costs via its Hulu streaming service. The proposed antitrust suit, filed in a San Francisco federal court on behalf of YouTube TV subscribers in California, Arizona, Indiana and Kentucky, alleges that Disney uses its control of virtual MVPD service Hulu+Live TV, along with its ownership of ESPN, to dictate pricing in the virtual pay TV market:

3. Disney owns, operates, and controls the second largest SLPTV provider, Hulu, which provides an SLPTV product called Hulu + Live TV. Disney also controls ESPN, the largest cost input into every SLPTV product in the country. Disney operates these businesses (ESPN and Hulu) as a single economic entity, allowing it to negotiate horizontal, anticompetitive carriage agreements for ESPN and ESPN-related channels, which are the largest cost input to SLPTV products in the United States.

4. Disney’s carriage agreements with its SLPTV competitors contain two terms that provide Disney pricing power over the entire market. First, Disney’s carriage agreements contain language requiring that base or lowest-priced bundles offered by SLPTV providers must include ESPN. Second, Disney’s carriage agreements include Most Favored Nation (“MFN”) clauses that put upward price pressure on every rival SLPTV product.

5. Together, these carriage agreement mandates—which now cover all of Disney’s leading competitors in the SLPTV Market—allow Disney to use ESPN and Hulu to set a price floor in the SLPTV Market and to inflate prices marketwide by raising the prices of its own products. And this is exactly what Disney has done in the past three years, since it took operational control of Hulu.

6. Since Disney acquired operational control over Hulu in May 2019, prices across the SLPTV Market, including for YouTube TV, have doubled. This dramatic, marketwide price inflation has been led by Disney’s own price hikes for Hulu + Live TV, and has directly tracked Disney’s competitorby-competitor negotiation of new SLPTV carriage agreements over this time period.

The proposed lawsuit notes that the cost of YouTube TV has risen in large part to the alleged machinations of Disney:

As for YouTube TV, controlled by tech giant Alphabet, Inc. (“Google”), Google’s carriage agreements with Disney have r resulted in a near-100% price increase of YouTube TV’s base package, from $35 to $65. And indeed, during hard-nosed carriage agreement renegotiations in late 2021, YouTube TV publicly stated that absent its agreement with Disney, it would provide an ESPN-less base plan at $15 less than it otherwise charged for its baseline product.

The lawsuit makes for some interesting reading, especially given the public speculation that returning Disney head Bob Iger might sell off Hulu to Comcast or spin-off ESPN. As this lawsuit details quite nicely, the people suggesting those moves aren't considering the way each of Disney's products interact with each other.

I have no idea how seriously to take this proposed lawsuit. And it's not clear to me how they'll prove their allegations. Although it's clear that Disney (and its rival big media companies) all use their deep portfolios and market size to bludgeon MVPD and vMVPDs into submission.

If you want to know what happened to the promise of the "skinny bundle," this proposed lawsuit nicely lays out what the problem might be.

I HADN'T THOUGHT OF 'SAN ANDREAS' AS A CHRISTMAS MOVIE...BUT OKAY...
Entertainment-oriented vMVPD Philo released its list of the ten most-watched Christmas movies on its platform last week and it is a ragtag combination of films:

1) The Royal Nanny (Hallmark Channel)
2) Three Wise Men and a Baby (Hallmark Channel)
3) A Merry Christmas Wish (Great American Family)
4) Christmas by Starlight (Hallmark Channel)
5) San Andreas (A&E)
6) Boo! A Madea Halloween (BET)
7) Inventing the Christmas Prince (Hallmark Channel)
8) All Saints Christmas (Hallmark Channel)
9) Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married Too? (BET)
10)Christmas at the Golden Dragon (Hallmark Channel)

THE CASE FOR LETTING A JOURNALIST ACTUALLY DO THE INTERVIEW
As someone whose age is approaching the Dinosaur era, I've lived through a lot of changes in the relationship between the entertainment/media press and the people they cover. When I started interviewing celebrities (and non-celebrities), the guidelines and restrictions were few and generally pretty easy to stomach. Along the lines of "please don't ask about his recent divorce." And since I don't much care for gossip, requests like those are easy for me to navigate.

But over the years, control over interviews has tightened to the point where it can be oppressive when you're speaking with someone at the A or even B-list level. You have their team listening to every word, prepared to push back after the fact and ask you to ignore their answer if they later decide it's awkward. There are all sorts of guidelines about what you can ask and often the guidelines just feel too much as I am being asked to just transcribe their approved thoughts for publication. I recently turned down an interview with the star of a TV show because I was told they wouldn't discuss 1) a recent change in showrunner, 2) their two co-stars, 3) a story twist from the previous season that had been controversial with fans, or 4) their incessant shilling of Crypto, including special emails to fans on their private fan group email list.

Hey, I get it. No one likes to discuss uncomfortable things. And there are certainly plenty of journalists I'd skip if I wasn't in the mood to answer gossipy questions. But this is someone I've interviewed several times in the past. I was respectful and on point for what they were promoting. I even received an email from their personal publicist passing along feedback from the star about how much fun our last interview had been.

But I'm not here to be an easy way to pass along comments that could have just as easily sent out in a press release. I'm someone who came up reporting local news before moving on to national outlets. This might be entertainment, but I take it just as seriously as if I were writing about some obscure piece of tax legislation. 

You can blame all of this ranting on a brief snippet I read about Ryan Reynolds, who is set to "headline" London's Just For Laughs Comedy Fest. Yes, headline. Although luckily not in the sense of Reynolds introducing a tight 45-minutes of new stand-up. Reynolds is going to do an on-stage interview, moderated by well-known journalist actor, friend and Deadpool 2 co-star Rob Delaney. 

This is a popular trend for A-list stars right now. It's an interview/public event. But instead of being moderated or conducted by a journalist, the questions are asked by some celebrity friend, co-star or other friendly face. Hey, I get it. No one wants to be embarrassed by an uncomfortable question. But here's a little secret that your personal publicist might not tell you. Their job is minimize any potentially bad situation, not maximize what you and your fans will get from the interview. And seasoned journalists can draw unexpected yet positive responses from you. We know how to ask the right questions. And if we don't, there are plenty of other journalists you can choose.

As an example of a great interview, Matt Zoller Seitz talked to Jamie Lee Curtis for Vulture and I have no idea whether there were any restrictions on what he could ask. But it is an absolutely perfect example of what it looks like when a talented journalist interviews a star who is willing to open up and have a conversation.

ODDS AND SODS
* In what can best be described as an effort to combine the most annoying show on the Food Network with the most annoying food-related trends on social media, Anne Burrell & Darnell Ferguson are hosting Worst Cooks in America: Viral Sensations, which will feature contestants wo are "influencers online but clueless in the kitchen." Trigger alert, the contestants include a puppeteer. It premieres Sunday, January 1st, 2023.

* I end up having a lot of interesting industry discussions on Twitter. But although I helped kick the thread off, this long back-and-forth between industry veterans Andrew A. Rosen and David Poland about the challenges and future of streaming is really fascinating.

* Tonya Hopkins will be hosting the new seven-episode Food Network series The Kwanzaa Menu, which premieres Monday, December 26th.

* TV Line has a rundown of ten shows it believes run the risk on being canceled in the next 24 hours.

* Top Gun: Maverick will be available to stream globally (except for South Korea and France) on Paramount+

TWEET OF THE DAY - SPEAKING OF PUBLICISTS

WHAT'S NEW FOR TUESDAY:

Bachelor In Paradise Season Finale (ABC)
Blood Relatives (Shudder)
Dangerous Breed: Crime. Cons. Cats. (Peacock)
New Amsterdam Fall Finale (NBC)
Our Universe (Netflix)
The Bermuda Triangle: Into Cursed Waters Series Premiere (History)
The Murder Tapes Season Finale (Investigation Discovery)
Trevor Noah: I Wish You Would (Netflix)
Welcome To Chippendales Series Premiere (Hulu)

Click Here to see the list of all of the upcoming premiere dates for the next few months.

SEE YOU WEDNESDAY!

If you have any feedback, send it along to Rick@AllYourScreens.com and follow me on Twitter @aysrick.