Donald Trump’s new “best friends” in the media, One America News Network (OANN), had the chinks in their armor exposed yesterday by Bloomberg:
… unlike the networks it wants to compete with -- Fox News, MSNBC and CNN -- OAN has never been carried by big pay-TV providers like Comcast Corp., Charter Communications Inc. and Dish Network Corp. To reach its audience, the network depends heavily on its largest distributor, AT&T Inc.’s DirecTV, which has been losing subscribers at a rapid clip.
But wait, it gets even worse. For them, that is.
Turns out DirecTV’s four-year agreement with OANN is set to expire early next year and while the network’s president says the deal won’t end, he declined to say why.
Bloomberg hints that the network’s programming may be one reason the other providers aren’t interested, especially after those operators have been coming under increased scrutiny in recent months. But the big issue is financial … it seems that any carriage agreement has to duplicate the terms of OANN’s deal with AT&T, which include making the channel to a minimum of 85% of its subscribers, paying 15 cents every month to OANN for every one of those subscribers, and carrying a second channel called AWE (for A World of Entertainment*).
19 million of OANN’s “viewers” are on AT&T, which it only managed to secure a channel position from by suing them (and AT&T itself is hemorrhaging subscribers). The remaining ones are online and through platforms like Roku, which doesn’t always appeal to their target demographic (Faux News viewers) because they like to watch their news on the tee-vee. If OANN is just blowing smoke and their carriage agreement on DirecTV does expire shortly after the beginning of 2021 — I think a good expiration date would be January 21 — their remaining 16 million viewers would be on those platforms, and that would be a more than 50% loss.
And those numbers aren’t all actual viewers, just the number of households where the channel is available for viewing. Their commercial rates must be scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Sure doesn’t look promising for them.
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*-AWE’s schedule appears to be a non-stop parade of quasi-travelogs featuring mansions and expensive resorts (think “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” without Robin Leach), plus OANN for a half-hour several times a day.