David M. Zaslav
Management
Thanks, Rich. Well, first, I think, ultimately, consumer behavior and consumer consumption is what drives the capitalist market. So you can develop a channel, but you have to create content that people want to get nourished by. So you can sit in a conference room and say what you want to provide people. Ultimately, the consumer is the one that is always the determining winner. And you look at outside the U.S. – outside the U.S., there have been very successful skinny bundles. We're on all of them. We have quality content with strong brands that are valued. Our cost of content is relatively low. And we've done extremely well on all of those skinny bundles all over the world, in Latin America, in Eastern Europe and Europe, and each of them have been in the very low price range. And even when there is sports, sports is just hyper-extended here in the U.S. reflected in regional sports, traditional sports. Retransmission can extend the integration of sports with other channels. And so this is a bit of a stuffed turkey here, and in many ways, when I read about the skinny bundle here in the U.S., I see the skinny bundle in 200 countries. When I look here in the U.S. and I read skinny bundle, there is no skinny bundle here. Skinny bundle in the U.S. is a fiction. The idea that you have a $40 offering filled with regional sports, sports and all these – an incomplete package, really, and then you have to buy broadband on top of it, so the skinny bundle is $60 or $70. So it's really not a skinny bundle. It's a bundle. It's a bundle that may be attractive to a small group of people. But, in the end, I think the market will be rationalized. We represent 12% or 13% of viewership. We have the top channel for women in ID, the number one channel for men in Discovery, top channel in Middle America with TLC, a top channel for African Americans with Oprah and Tyler, and our cost of content is low. We are on DIRECTV NOW. We're on Sony. We're on many of the platforms. But, ultimately, there should be a bundle like everywhere else in the world that's $8, $10, $12. And I believe that will happen. I think these overstuffed turkeys are going to end up being a challenge from a consumer perspective, and the consumer's going to say, I'd like to have an opportunity here. And in many ways, Netflix is a terrific company, and they continue to be very effective, and so does Amazon, but we as an industry need to complement that with a quality offering that isn't – that's a true skinny bundle in the spirit of what's working around the world, and I think that'll happen. It's just a question of when.