Robert A. Iger
Analyst · Ben Swinburne with Morgan Stanley
First of all, they've always had that flexibility, but they haven't had that much interest. I'm assuming either they themselves haven't had it or they haven't had it from their customers. And so ESPN has remained basically on a highly distributed tier, not just with Comcast, but across the industry. Now there's so much that's been said about cord cutting and cord slicing and a la carte packages. I think it's just important to emphasize a couple of points about that again. First, I'll start with ESPN. I think they've now gotten to a point because of their popularity and the quality of what they offer, they almost transcend sports. They offer news, stories that are of interest nationally and locally, they program 6,400 hours of live and original programming a year, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. Their ratings double the combination of all the RSNs in markets as a -- for instance. And I just think, generally speaking, not only are they popular, but they've gotten into that virtual must-have category. Now we don't take that for granted. But because of their position and because of not just their popularity, but almost the value that they now supply both to the distributor and to the customer, we don't really see either a la carte offerings or cord splicing -- or slicing I guess, I should say, as a trend. The only thing I want to say about a la carte and I'll say it -- I've said it a few times, is that I think people want variety, and they're getting it today, and they're also getting substantially increased quality. I've said this before, but for $60, which is the average cost of the expanded basic service, consumers get about 100 channels of programming. Those channels, ours and others, have put billions of dollars into programming over the years, so that the product is a lot better. And if suddenly, they were able to buy these channels on an a la carte basis, we know what would happen. First of all, there would be channels that are of interest to a lot of different entities, in some cases, niche channels, that would simply go away. And I don't think that would necessarily be good. Secondly, the channels that were left would see decreased distribution, decreased ratings, decreased advertising revenue, and that will put a lot of pressure on the rates that they charge. So the rates would go up. The result would be that consumers would be spending more per channel, and it's quite possible that the $60 100-channel package would quickly become a $60 50-channel package. And I don't think that's necessarily good. So I think that's one of the reasons why we're not seeing some great interest in cord cutting because I think, generally, consumers are happy with the quality and the variety that they're getting, and the price-to-value relationship is generally good.