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Cord Snipped: Mark Cuban Nails It on Cord Cutting, ESPN Seeing Success with Snapchat

By Kyle Scott

Published: Apr 1st, 2015 · 12:48 PM EDT

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Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban was on CNBC this morning discussing a whole bunch of things, including cord cutting:

“Money is always made in content by aggregating and disaggregating, and people are trying to disaggregate right now to see if there’s money there. But at some point, someone’s gonna walk in an say I’m gonna aggregate HBO Now, I’m gonna aggregate Sling, I’m gonna aggregate CBS, I’m gonna aggregate whoever else is streaming. They’re gonna come to CNBC and say, look, I’ve got this $99 package where we take the work out of you picking who to stream. And now, all of a sudden, AT&T or whoever comes back and say, well they’re selling it for $99 to get all the channels… we’ll sell you 200 channels for $89.”

I almost tore my rotator cuff cheering him on with that, because it made me feel smart. I’ve said almost the exact same thing about bundling streaming services many times.

Since it’s kind of our lane around here to post about cord cutting and sports streaming and such, people email me and ask if they think they should save money and cut the cord. But it’s not going to be about saving money. Broadband providers will charge more for the more capable broadband tiers that will be needed to handle all the streaming (one reason why the Comcast-Time Warner deal getting approved would hurt competition and ergo your wallet). And that’s before someone comes in and bundles everything together and what you’re left with in 5-10 years is something that looks exactly like your current cable package, only with content that’s available online, on all your devices, and by that point probably embedded into your skin via the  Epidermis.

 

Snapchat

I’m guessing most of our readers – late 20s, early 30s – aren’t fully into the Snapchat thing, but it’s huge among basically everyone under 25, and what the company is doing with media right now is fascinating. From a Sports Business Journal piece about how ESPN is delivering highlights on Snapchat:

A Winter X Games post on Snapchat Stories logged close to 30 million views for ESPN, sources said. While Snapchat posts delete shortly after they are seen, posts on Snapchat Stories stay on the platform for at least 24 hours.

ESPN’s posts on Snapchat’s Discover platform generally are seen about 1 million times a day, sources said. In January, ESPN signed on as the exclusive sports service on Snapchat’s Discover platform, which also includes content from companies like CNN, Comedy Central, Food Network and Vice.

Snapchat, like Instagram and Vine, is built for mobile. Unlike YouTube or Facebook (and maybe a little bit, Twitter), they’re not legacy desktop platforms being converted to mobile. They’re mobile-first. There’s an entire generation of young people who not only will never watch traditional TV, but who also will never understand why we all used to “go online” by sitting at a desk and typing in a URL. Being built for mobile – and, sadly, portrait video – gives these platforms a huge leg up going forward. Next up: Periscope.