Seems that no matter how much or how little they may be pursuing it, the kind folks at Comcast can’t keep their media properties out of the news cycle. Just this week alone two of the problem children that were recently lumped into their stock play pursuit know for the time being as SpinCo have made headlines. Neither was particularly surprising, but the fact that they were basically tossed out one after the other would seem to suggest that a lot of these decisions have already been made, and we’re going to learn about it when those kind folks want us to officially know about it.
On Monday it was announced that an all-but-forgotten problem child was officially designated for extinction, as DEADLINE’s Dade Hayes reported:
NBCUniversal, which has already been evaluating its stake in the declining pay-TV business, plans to shut down cable network Universal Kids.
The move, slated to take effect March 6, comes as NBCU prepares to spin off most of its cable networks into a new, publicly traded company to be led by longtime senior exec Mark Lazarus. That transaction is expected to close by the end of 2025. Bravo is the notable holdout, expected to stay in the main corporate fold along with NBC, Telemundo and the local station portfolio.
Universal Kids was created from the network formerly known as Sprout. That joint venture with PBS Kids was a competitor during the pre-YouTube era when Nickelodeon, Disney and Time Warner were its rivals for young viewers and families tuning in on cable. In the current environment of cord-cutting and dwindling viewership and advertising across pay-TV, the returns on continued investment in Universal Kids have grown more uncertain.
As a brand, Universal Kids remained significant for NBCU and parent Comcast, which broke ground last year on the Universal Kids Resort theme park in Frisco, TX. The company also positioned Universal Kids as a synergistic home for DreamWorks Animation programming after Comcast acquired DWA in 2016.
But a brand that reflects a content toehold isn’t necessarily a road to relevance, and Michael Schneider’s comprehensive year-end wrap-up of 2024 ratings rankings for the 155 networks measured by Nielsen confirms this. Universal Kids ranked in a three-way tie for 139th, barely ahead of Disney’s equally obscure boy-centric XD channel. A mere 20,000 persons watched the channel in an average minute, a full 85% lower than still-standardbearer Nickelodeon, despite a -31% year/year decline of its own. There are FAST channels that are capable of delivering similarly sized audiences. So TTFN, problem child.
And speaking of problem children, mere hours after her name was attached to the “Hail Mary” move to restore Rachel Maddow to five-day-a-week work for a spell, the maligned leader of the most-viewed NBC cable network was given her official walking papers, as THE DAILY CALLER’s Robert McGreevy reported:
MSNBC President Rashida Jones is stepping down…Jones spent nearly four years as the network’s president. She took over in February 2021, following a year the network averaged nearly 1.6 million primetime viewers, according to Pew Research. That number dipped to under 830,000 after 2022, but bounced back to 1.23 million after 2024, according to Adweek. Jones told staffers she made the decision to step down over the holidays.
As Seneca once expressed while his own empire was in trouble, “it is to laugh”.
Jones just happened to take office right after the Biden-Harris administration did, and while she achieved some measure of success with the inherited Maddow and the reporting chops of NBC News veterans such as Andrea Mitchell, she also championed a lineup of not merely progressive but DEI-infused personalities such as Joy Reid, Stephanie Ruhle, Symone Sanders-Townsend and Jen Psaki. If you’re noticing a pattern of choice, you’re not alone. And while Sanders-Townsend was downgraded to a weekend anchor role from her eponymous talk show, the other three were given renegotiated contracts by Jones during a period that just happened to coincide with Harris’ ill-fated losing of the presidential election.
It’s not exactly a winning playbook for any replacement to inherit, so leave it to Lazarus and company to put it in the hands of someone whose bar for improvement isn’t exactly stellar, as McGreevy chortled:
(T)he network will replace her with Rebecca Kutler, a key architect of the failed CNN+ streaming service, The New York Times reported Tuesday…Kutler is leaping up from the position of senior vice president of content strategy. Before that she was head of programming at CNN+, the media conglomerate’s $300 million streaming service, which they shut down after one month.
“Rebecca is the ideal leader to guide us through this moment, and I look forward to collaborating with her as we shape our collective future together,” NBC Universal Chairman Mark Lazarus told staffers, according to the NYT.
At first blush, for Lazarus to be so supportive of someone with such a track record would be enough to evoke plenty of spit takes. But when taken into the context of the news of Lazarus’ other appointments to his team that VARIETY’s Brian Steinberg reported on last week it kinda falls in line:
Val Boreland, an executive who has specialized in acquiring content for the various cable networks owned by NBCUniversal, will lead the entertainment operations of those outlets whey they are spun off from the company later this year.
Boreland has been named president of entertainment for “SpinCo,” the new entity that is expected to be a separate, publicly traded entity when a transaction is finalized. In the recent past, she has snared releases from Universal Filmed Entertainment Group for the Peacock streaming service following their theatrical release, and also brought the “John Wick” franchise to Peacock with a prequel series “The Continental.”
Boreland’s appointment suggests that the company may try to fuel viewership with strategic deals that bring popular series and specials to its network schedules, rather than focusing solely on original series.
So maybe by the time the dust settles and it’s less expensive to buy out Jones’ all-star team Boreland will have found some documentaries and cooking series with the help of someone like Kutler, who was initially given carte blanche to do the same thing to round out CNN+. And that’s likely to please one particular viewer who may hold the key into whatever SpinCo eventually decides to do. Yep, he kept Comcast in the news cycle even longer than they had planned, as MEDIAITE’s Ahmad Austin Jr. lamented:
President-elect Donald Trump slammed Seth Meyers in response to the criticisms the comedian’s made in multiple segments of his talk show. Early Tuesday morning, Trump took to Truth Social to express how “bad” he thinks Meyers is.
“How bad is Seth Meyers on NBC,” Trump said, “a ‘network’ run by a truly bad group of people – Remember, they also run MSDNC. I got stuck watching Marble Mouth Meyers the other night, the first time in months, and every time I watch this moron I feel an obligation to say how dumb and untalented he is, merely a slot filler for the Scum that runs Comcast. These guys should be paying a lot of money for the right to give these ‘in kind’ contributions to the Radical Left Democrat Party. These are not shows or entertainment, they are simply political hits, 100% of the time, to me and the Republican Party. Comcast should pay a BIG price for this!”
Meyers wisely sidestepped any immediate response last night, though it may just be that his writers need a bit more to craft the level of response that the insomniac rants of an obese thin-skinned 78-year-old manchild was capable of expressing. When they have the time they are far more creative and indeed accurate, as Austin Jr. noted:
Meyers has dedicated a significant amount of airtime to mocking the incoming president in recent weeks. Last week, he joked about Trump’s comments on the ongoing California wildfires, saying:
And let me just say, after four years of Joe Biden — who was prone to a senior moment now and then — it is so refreshing to have “Kid Science” here tell us it’s called rain. He didn’t even have to Google that. Also, dude, it doesn’t come from Heaven. Even God would tell you that. Rain comes from clouds, you doink!”
Seth, as a fan and supporter, allow me to help you in the interim. Clearly while he was “stuck” watching you (those Big Macs do have a way of keeping onebusy on those gilded toilets surrounding by boxes of classified documents, unable to find a clean finger to switch video feeds, eh?) he had missed the facts that the likes of Hayes led his reporting of Universal Kids’ demise–or, indeed, what moi mused nearly two months ago–that the folks at NBC no longer run MS-whatever. And that even in decline you’re still attracting considerably more viewers to your “slot filler” that Universal Kids–and, per your 4Q24 audience estimates–1,025,000 total viewers; 166,000 18-49–you’re way ahead of just about everyone except Maddow in overall appeal, and demographically superior even to her.
Feel free to include that in any of your comebacks that you may choose to offer up in the coming days, and make sure the Comcast press machine does its part to amplify it. After all, that’s substance, not Spin.
Until next time…