3 ms·

I'm curious about the $30B figure. How did you arrive at that?

• erichocean 13y ago
  I didn't arrive at it, it's a well-known industry figure, I'm not sure where I heard it first. (I live in Los Angeles and lived in Hollywood for years, working mostly on the film side, but I know a lot of people in TV, too.) Here's an article for consumers on unbundling[1] I found after one Google search that says that ESPN alone receives $7.2 billion per year from US cable companies, which sounds about right to me. (They also earn money for ads, I don't know if any of that is kicked back to the cable companies. I doubt it...) It shouldn't be surprising even if you crunch the numbers yourself. There's ~100 million cable subscribers, and the average combined bill (Internet/Cable/Phone) was $128/month in 2011.[2] So that's $153.6 billion per year. It's not hard to imagine that ~20% of that goes to the people making the content that's playing on cable. If anything, it'd be surprising if it were lower than that. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/02/technology/cable-a-la-carte/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/02/technology/cable-a-la-carte/... [2] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203479104577124494272500550.html?mod=e2tw http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020347910457712...