>>14626374I said TNT would lose carriage fees, not that they would be dropped from lineups. WBD's MLB/NHL packages are only a few games per week, not 10+; and the baseball games are simulcast on regional networks with the local broadcast teams. NCAA is only during the month of March. TNT/TBS are not sports networks, they are networks that offer sports here and there. Nobody in Arizona is keeping their $80/month cable channel because they're dying to see Marlins vs Reds on a Tuesday night, and then Giants vs Rangers the next Tuesday. The days of showing exclusively Braves games are long gone.
The idea that WBD would blow $200M/year, as they now face many times that amount in revenue shortfall, is laughable. As I stated in my previous post -- just drawing a rating is not enough if your product turns off advertisers. AEW is not a critically acclaimed drama where a few swears and a gunfight is part of the evolution of the story -- AEW swearing/bleeding it's largely superfluous and could just as easily be worked around 90% of the time without harming the product.
>HBO is owned by WBD, you retardNo shit dumbfuck, but it's not a standard channel in cable packages like TNT, TBS, ESPN, A&E, Paramount Network, FS1, Discovery and other top channels are. It's a premium offering where they could swear all they want, have the women show ass/tits, they can go all out. A deal with HBO/Cinemax/Starz/Showtime wouldn't be based on projected ratings or what advertisers are willing to pay, but rather how many eyeballs they bring to the product.
If AEW were able to deliver a premium cable channel hundreds of thousands of new subscribers, that almost exclusively watch AEW programming and not much else, they could make a lot of coin via incentives. But it would be a big gamble and going from TV-14 to TV-MA and back again could be a big hassle.
