Far-left MTV is shutting down five of its music channels in the United Kingdom. Australia, Poland, France, and Brazil will soon follow. And the future does not look bright for the 44-year-old brand here in the U.S.
For more than a decade, I’ve been reporting on cord-cutting — when customers have finally had enough of over-paying and they cancel those bloated cable and satellite packages filled with a hundred networks they never watch.
Primarily, I’ve been reporting on how the cable TV racket has worked as a left-wing affirmative-action corporate welfare program for Hollywood — specifically, networks that could not survive on merit with revenue from advertising based on viewership numbers.
Networks such as CNN, MSNBC, the Disney Channel, Comedy Central, and MTV would have zero chance in the wild. Too few people watch. What keeps them alive are the carriage fees that explode your cable bill.
If, for example, MTV or CNN are part of your cable package, whether or not you watch them, you still directly subsidize them through the carriage fees in your cable bill. When 100 million households subscribed to cable, a measly dollar a month carriage fee per customer for a CNN or MTV meant $100 million a month in unearned revenue for both of those hate outlets, or more than $1 billion per year.
The entertainment corporations accomplish this through blackmail. Basically it goes like this: If your cable company wants access to one of our popular channels, you have to take all of our crap networks with it. Then you, the unsuspecting customer, got the bill — not just for networks you never watch, but for networks like CNN, MTV, and Comedy Central that are part of your TV package even though they openly champion your destruction.
Well, all that changed when people began cutting the cord, especially when they were given the option, though streaming, of only paying for what they watch, or not paying anything at all. After all, the free programming available through streaming is a pile of limitless treasures. No one has to pay for TV anymore.
Over the last 15 or so years, cable subscribers have declined from 105 million households to just 66 million. That’s a lot less money for these multinational entertainment companies, especially when you look at the billions they pour into streaming services that either lose money or net very little.
That means budget cuts. Tee hee. That means something’s got to go, and if no one is watching CNN, Comedy Central, or MTV anymore, that’s a pretty good place to start.
Well, the end appears nigh for MTV.
The end of MTV (except for MTV HD) in these foreign countries is a direct result of Skydance purchasing Paramount Global and looking for places to save money.
“The music video channel that launched in 1981 and morphed into a reality-TV destination is — like its sister networks Comedy Central and Nickelodeon under media giant Paramount Skydance — getting slammed by cord cutting,” reports the New York Post. “For now, CEO David Ellison and his No. 2, Jeff Shell have no plans to shutter MTV’s US operations largely because it’s an iconic brand with enough viewership to keep it running.”
For now.
Still…
“The higher-ups at Paramount Skydance are weighing their options for MTV,” adds the Post. “One future possibility: Turning what remains of the franchise into a pure-play streaming property.”
Streaming will be the last gasp of MTV, and will eventually be the last gasp for other unpopular left-wing garbage, like Comedy Central and CNN.
Because no one watches these terrible outlets, there’s no serious advertising revenue coming in. Between that and the ongoing cord cutting, the production costs to keep these channels running no longer make sense, so why not move it to streaming and see if it can survive there?
It won’t.
Or if it does, it will be much diminished with so little money coming in.
So, yes, it’s true: The moral arc of the universe does indeed bend towards justice.
And yes, if you want to kill off CNN, MSNBC, Comedy Central, and MTV, the only way to do it is to cut the cord. Do it. For America.
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.
