GBTV starts streaming today – a two hour Intrnet only show at 5PM for $4.95/month, and the streaming of the radio show for an additional charge, replacing Insider Extreme.
So Glenn Beck is now entirely on his own (with Clear Channel supportive of what he is doing). tV as you know it may change today.
So this is Glenn’s “Howard Stern” moment? I admit a bias – I am not fond of OCD doomsayers continually harping on the end of civilization. In my mind, as soon as he is gone from TV, he will essentially disappear from life as we know it. Because I am not a fan, I assume I must be wrong – that he will draw even more fans and become more popular than Rush all because I can’t see why anyone would listen to him anymore (he is so far over the top now, I think Jimmy Swaggart is one of his trainees).
Any ideas on what the thinking is? I could use some education.
Well, little details I’ve heard or read…
Your Howard Stern comparison is apt – Stern had critical mass to draw a lot of people with him to Sirius – a million people willing to pay $20 a month is $240 million a year – much more than the traditional advertiser supported TV model could ever pony up. Of course, Stern is not the only thing on Sirius/XM – but they now have 20 million subscribers. Stern is immune to any kind of boycott by sponsors and FCC control over the content (although I expect the Dems at the FCC to give it a try).
Beck’s contract with Premiere is up next year. He mentioned today that the budget for GBTV will burn through $20 million between now and the end of the year (a lot of that is probably the trip to Jerusalem).
Keeping in mind that people lie about subscriber counts, the “Glenn Beck Extreme” supposedly has 80,000 paying subscribers currently, or around $500k a month in revenue.
GBTV will be using the platform created for Major League Baseball – I haven’t looked into the details, but I’m guessing it is using actual multicast streaming – meaning the stream doesn’t have to be sent out a million times for a million viewers. Comcast would get one copy of the stream, and send one copy to each city where it has subscribers, and then the local hardware handles the splitting of the stream – not too different from how Cable TV works today. It’s available down to the the iPhone, etc… While the video will be HD if you can support it, it will degrade gracefully to support what your hardware will support.
Unlike Stern, the show will still have commercials – but not entirely dependent on them as over-the-air TV is. So long as the radio show is part of the morning simulcast, he’s locked into the Premiere “show clock” and has to have commercial breaks.
The 5 PM show is basically going to be his Fox show, except he has 2 hours to cover the things he wants to do, and isn’t constrained by what Roger Ailes and Fox’s Saudi prince owner wants him to not talk about.
One thing I’m curious about is when Glenn is going to have his “Aha!” moment about Israel and Socialism. Not everyone living in Israel is a socialist, but it is a strong influence:
From: http://www.kibbutzprogramcenter.org/kpc/node/5
Will he fall off the face of the earth?
I would say he is picking a strategic time to make the jump, during the Fall run-up to next year’s elections. It seems he gained his popularity immediately after Obama was inaugurated, so maybe now he is hoping to grab more headlines during the campaign.
I think he either hits the jackpot, or goes out in a big blaze and vanishes. I’m not sure which, but right now I’m leaning toward it being a success, based on the high caliber people he has hired around him. One thing I’m wondering is if this is all self-funded from revenue or if Mercury is borrowing money to do this, or if there are other investors in the company.
I wonder if anyone at “Glenn Beck Inc” understands how much of America in flyover country where most of his audience lives still does not have access to non-metered broadband. For those folks it’s not a question of whether they want to pay $4.95 a month. The bandwidth to watch streaming video simply isn’t available.
Not to worry – the FCC is bringing high speed broadband to you any day now, no matter if you’re 100 miles from the nearest road. It’s part of the FCC’s plan to collectivize the costs of giving everyone free internet access – it’s a basic human right, after all (according to the past FCC chairman)