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Tuesday, March 12, 2013

NBCUniversal’s Cable Ratings Drop: Comcast Not Seeing The Forest For The Trees*


Syfy's promising new original series, Defiance, starts in April.
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had a piece on NBCUniversal’s (NBCU) drooping cable channel ratings, particularly for long-time revenue engines like the Syfy channel (down 4% in viewership in 2012) and E! Entertainment (down 10%). There’s an irony in this since I believe NBCU’s parent, Comcast, is to blame for the drop in its own subsidiary’s ratings due to some ambitious pricing of its properties. What were once free (or almost free) basic cable channels suddenly became part of bundled cable “packages” that you had to shell out close to $20 a month for--and that’s how Syfy lost me as a viewer.