Musings on the economies of cutting the cord.

Over the past 14 years, there has been only one constant in my TV viewing, and that's The Daily Show. I first loved it with Craig Kilborn, and even more under Jon Stewart. I've seen almost all of them, even after going away for a few weeks, because when you drop the interview and commercials, it's a pretty quick play. Jon Stewart's decision to leave got a much stronger reaction from me than any other TV show news, though I think the show will survive.

I don't know how many viewers are like me, but I think that TDS is one of the most commercially valuable programs on TV. It is the primary reason I have not "cut the cord" (or rather turned off the satellite.) I want to get it in HD, with the ability to skip commercials, at 8pm on the night that it was made. No other show I watch regularly meets this test. I turned off my last network show last year -- I had been continuing to watch just the "Weekend Update" part of SNL along with 1 or 2 sketches. It always surprised me that the Daily Show team could produce a better satirical newscast than the SNL writers, even though SNL's team had more money and a whole week to produce much less material.

The reason I call it that valuable is that by and larger, I am paying $45/month for satellite primarily to get that show. Sure, I watch other shows, but in a pinch, I would be willing to watch these other shows much later through other channels, like Netflix, DVD or online video stores at reasonable prices. I want the Daily Show as soon as I can, which is 8pm on the west coast. On the east coast, the 11pm arrival is a bit late.

I could watch it on their web site, but that's the next day, and with forced watching of commercials. My time is too valuable to me to watch commercials -- I would much rather pay to see it without them. (As I have pointed out there, you receive around $1-$2 in value for every hour of commercials you watch on regular TV, though the online edition only plays 4 ads instead of the more typical 12-15 of broadcast that I never see.)

In the early days at BitTorrent when we were trying to run a video store, I really wanted us to do a deal with Viacom/Comedy Central/TDS. In my plan, they would release the show to us (in HD before the cable systems moved to HD) as soon as possible (ie. before 11pm Eastern) and with unbleeped audio and no commercials. In other words, a superior product. I felt we could offer them more revenue per pay subscriber than they were getting from advertising. That's because the typical half-hour show only brings in around 15 cents per broadcast viewer, presuming a $10 CPM. They were not interested, in part because some people didn't want to go online, or had a bad view of BitTorrent (though the company that makes the software is not involved in any copyright infringement done with the tools.)

It may also have been they knew some of that true value. Viacom requires cable and satellite companies to buy a bundle of channels from them, and even though the channels show ads. Evidence suggests that the bundle of Viacom channels (Including Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon) costs around $2.80 per household per month. While there are people like me who watch only Comedy Central from the Viacom bundle, most people probably watch 2 or more of them. They should be happy to get $5/month from a single household for a single show, but they are very committed to the bundling, and the cable companies, who don't like the bundles, would get upset if Viacom sold individual shows like this and cable subscribers cut the cord.

In spite of this, I think the cord cutting and unbundling are inevitable. The forces are too strong. Dish Network's supposedly bold venture with Sling, which provides 20 channels of medium popularity for $20/month over the internet only offers live streaming -- no time-shifting, no fast forwarding -- so it's a completely uninteresting product to me.

As much as I love Jon Stewart, I think The Daily Show will survive his transition just fine. That's because it was actually pretty funny with Craig Kilborn. Stewart improved it, but he is just one part of a group of writers, producers and other on-air talent, including those who came from a revolving door with The Onion. There are other folks who can pull it off.

TDS is available a day late on Amazon Instant Video and next day on Google Play -- for $3/episode, or almost $50/month. You can get cable for a lot less than that. It's on iTunes for $2/episode or $10/month, the latter price being reasonable, does anybody know when it gets released? The price difference is rather large.