Craig Birkmaier wrote: > Cable companies do not mark up the extended basic tier, at least not > very much. Well, what I read says they do. About as much as I claimed. Which is why going direct to consumer would easily put more money in the ESPN pockets, for a given number of subscribers, than what they get now, for the same number of subscribers. The difference is, of course, that as of today, ESPN has a whole lot more subscribers in the old school business model. But that is changing. > Sorry about that, but if you offer channels in the extended basic > bundle ala carte, you kill the bundle. And Disney has many channels in > the extended basic bundle that would suffer. Only if you don't think ahead. Like I already said, just as ESPN can make out by going direct to consumer, so can the rest of Disney. As to the bundle, who cares? You keep moaning about the owner of those stables, Craig, after the car era began. The MVPDs might care, but even the MVPDs have figured out that they need to get more in the network infrastructure end of things. > One more time: > > Only a small percentage of MVPD subscribers are cutting the cord. One more time: even John Skipper said that a small percentage is enough to create big changes in the distribution model. Dropping from ~90 percent to ~78 percent, in a matter of 7 years, is not such an insignificant drop, especially because there's no obvious end in sight. Bert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.