All Bets Are Off for MSNBC, CNBC and Bravo: Behind the TV Spinoff That Will Shake Up Cable

The Sunday before Election Day, NBCUniversal had corporate synergy in full swing.

30 Rockefeller Plaza played home — for a day at least — to the longtime public affairs show Meet the Press, with moderator Kristen Welker grilling Sen. Raphael Warnock and Gov. Doug Burgum.

She was also joined by her colleagues to tee up the election: Steve Kornacki worked the interactive “Big Board,” explaining the polls, and during the panel discussion, MSNBC host Jen Psaki served as the liberal voice.

It was synergy that may never happen again, if NBCU parent company Comcast successfully splits its cable channels from the rest of its media assets.

The cable giant Wednesday said that it was planning to officially move forward with its proposed split, which will see MSNBC, CNBC, E!, Syfy, USA, Oxygen, Golf Channel, Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes spun out into their own company, which will be led by Mark Lazarus.

But the SpinCo deal brings with it a slew of complications, and executives seem to have few answers to them as of now. What happens after the split is complete could reshape the channels — and the TV industry as a whole.

Nowhere are the questions more acute than in Comcast’s cable news channels MSNBC and CNBC. An MSNBC source described the mood at the network as “depressed,” while a CNBC source described the mood as “annoyed, but probably fine.”

It’s a dynamic that makes sense. MSNBC has benefitted enormously by its close ties to NBC News, with its own talent gaining broadcast exposure and many NBC anchors filling time on the cable channel. MSNBC has relied on the vast reporting capabilities of NBC News, which it has supplemented with its own, more opinion-driven programming.

CNBC, meanwhile, has long operated with a high degree of autonomy. Its executive offices, newsroom and studios are in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey (it has satellite studios at the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq), and it has only been since Cesar Conde took over the NBCUniversal News Group in 2020 that CNBC resources had begun to be integrated with the larger news operation.

Staffers there are uncertain of what is to come (don’t expect discounted theme park vacations anymore) but are more confident in their ability to execute outside of the larger NBCU enterprise. CNBC began reporting to Lazarus yesterday, getting a head start on the new structure.

Lazarus on Wednesday met with top MSNBC talent, joined by MSNBC president Rashida Jones, according to a source familiar with the company. Lazarus was upbeat but acknowledged the complexities and uncertainties of the deal, some of which will cut very close to MSNBC’s identity.

Consider: Will the channel continue to be called MSNBC? Will it still be able to use the Peacock emblem? Will the channel cut a financial agreement with NBC News to continue using its reporting, or will it pursue other options? They are big questions without clear answers, and at MSNBC in particular, the devil will be in the details.

In a memo to NBCUniversal staff after the deal was announced, Comcast president Mike Cavanagh framed the new company in the context of news, sports and entertainment. USA and Golf Channel, he wrote, will be the home for sports, with rights to WWE, NASCAR, Premier League, golf, college basketball and the Olympics.

But will they really?

It is NBCUniversal that holds those rights, and while the companies are all but certain to work out some sort of deal to continue allowing those sports to appear on the cable channels, the spinoff also sets up some significant long-term uncertainty about whether SpinCo keeps those rights the next time NBCU renews them … or if it looks to acquire rights of its own.

Rick Cordella, the president of NBC Sports, said at a Sports Business Journal conference just hours after the deal was involved that the deal is “probably just a microcosm of our larger industry … when NBCU was first purchased by Comcast, [the cable channels] were the crown jewel, and now we’re looking at things a bit differently in this fragmented media world that we’re in.”

Like Lazarus, Cordella had few details about how the split would work, something that NBC’s sports rights partners are likely eager to hear more about.

“I can’t speak about all the logistics of how all this will happen, but from a sports perspective, the partners that we have on cable assets like Golf Channel and USA, we’re going to fulfill every obligation, every promise we made to them,” he added.

Golf Channel, it’s worth noting, is similar to CNBC in that it used to operate independently in Orlando before integrating with NBC Sports in 2021. Perhaps it will move back south in the spinoff.

But one sports source speculated that the new company could become a sports player itself, seeking whatever new rights it can to bulk up, given what could be a short shelf life for the legacy NBC sports content.

The new SpinCo will have plenty of entertainment, with USA, E!, Oxygen and Syfy all in the space to varying degrees. NBCU was in the process of spinning up more scripted fare on USA when the deal was announced.

But there is no question that in recent years, the bulk of NBCU’s entertainment investments have gone to Peacock, the NBC broadcast network, and to a lesser extent Bravo, with the cable channels doing what they could with fewer resources.

Will the new structure allow them to make more entertainment investments? Possibly. It could also allow them to be buyers from more producers, giving them optionality. The standalone company could also presumably cut its own streaming deals, letting it license its own entertainment to other streaming platforms. But cable is just not the home of entertainment anymore, as NBCU’s own actions demonstrate. Suits was a hit on USA, but it became a phenomenon on Netflix. The company’s upcoming spinoff, however, will live on NBC and Peacock, leaving USA in the lurch.

A quirk in the deal: NBCU is keeping one, lone, cable channel: Bravo.

It makes sense. Bravo has forged without question the strongest brand in the company’s cable portfolio, with its reality shows not only generating substantial TV viewership, but also viewership on Peacock. If any brand were to survive the shift to streaming in the company, Bravo would be it.

But the deal raises questions bout how long Bravo the cable channel will survive, or if NBCU wants to move faster to integrate it into Peacock (or for that matter, NBC, where Bravo-branded shows could live).

While Bravo will have the NBC network to help it retain carriage (more on that below), it will be left without its cable channel siblings in the larger portfolio (putting aside the Telemundo channels, with that business remaining intact).

There is no doubt that NBCU’s cable channels benefitted from being connected to the NBC broadcast network. When distribution deals come up, NBC is about as must-have as it gets, and the company had leverage to continue carriage for the rest of its channels.

This deal severs that connection and will force the SpinCo channels to negotiate for themselves, without the NBC hammer.

As S&P Global Market Intelligence analyst Scott Robson notes, Comcast has arguably been more aggressive in the cable space than any of its competitors when it comes to acknowledging the challenging economics of the business.

“Comcast has been more aggressive than any other media company in shutting down basic cable networks over the years, shutting down 7 networks since 2015,” Robson says. “As a result, it’s not very surprising that Comcast is spinning off the cable networks. The cable networks are more vulnerable for future declines than the broadcast networks due to the contraction of the pay-tv universe.”

S&P estimates that next year the biggest channels, including USA, Bravo, E!, MSNBC and Syfy, will be in about 60 million homes, and others like CNBC and Oxygen in slightly fewer. But what channels will be the tentpoles of the spinoff? USA? If so, how much leverage will it really have in talks?

Consolidation is the biggest question of all.

Comcast is making no qualms about what it sees the new company doing, with Cavanagh noting that SpinCo will be able to “play offense” and operate “as a potential partner and acquirer of other complementary media businesses.”

Immediately, the murmur in Hollywood focused on Paramount, where new leadership is set to take over in the new year, with a lot of interest in the Paramount studio, streaming and CBS, but less enthusiasm for the cable TV brands like MTV and Comedy Central.

Independent brands like AMC Networks or Hallmark come to mind too, as does Warner Bros. Discovery’s suite of channels, though executives there seem laser-focused on executing their strategy or seeking a bigger deal.

Comcast’s spin will set in motion major changes that aren’t quite clear yet, but it is all but certain it will become the long-awaited rollup vehicle for the industry. The only question is who is in and who is out.