Thread by @GoAngelo

1/ I want to just put a few things out there about OANN and ATT/DirecTV because in a way, the incredibly good Reuters reporting just begins to scratch the surface on how absurd and odious this deal is....

2/ Every cable company pays channels a fee per subscriber for carrying it.

Let's say cable company has 100 customers. And they want to carry a channel that has a fee of $1. They pay that channel $1 for every customer you have. So, you give them $1,000 every month.

3/ Usually the fee is a nominal fee. ATT has been paying OANN about 12 cents per subscriber. That seems small, but it's actually an incredibly huge number. The amount of revenue they give OANN every month is massive.

But it's worse than that.

4/ ATT has been what certainly seems like *overpaying* for OANN. Fees are set by negotiation, but a big driver is demand score (the # of people requesting the channel). OANN doesn't have a particular high demand score and certainly not one that would justify 12 cents.

5/ So let's be generous. Let's say OAN should be about 6 cents. That still means that ATT has been arguably *overpaying* for OANN by about twice as much as what they should have been paying.

But, it gets even worse.

6/ So the terms of the deal that OAN has with ATT/DirecTV are somewhat...unique. ATT reportedly requires that *if* OANN were to get pick up by another provider, that provider must offer the same terms.

Wow. Why's this matter?

7/ Well, this provision exposes something about how ATT views OANN. ATT almost certainly put this provision in the contract in order to make it harder for them to get pick up elsewhere...so that the channel would be largely limited to ATT.

8/ Put another way, the terms expose that ATT was at minimum invested in OAN's existence/success, so they could offer something unique to customers.

So sure, all the more reason to help subsidize the network by overpaying.

The final bad bad thing...

9/ OANN's contract...automatically renews each year. So weird. Earlier in the year, it seems ATT made the ACTIVE decision to allow the contract with OANN to renew...even after all the medical misinfo, attacks on election and Jan 6 insurrection.

10/ ATT has been helping prop up OAN. They've almost certainly been overpaying. And, when they had the clear exit ramp in front of them (or at least the chance to not pay), instead of taking it ... they just kept on riding.