Why C-Span’s YouTube Deal Is a Precedent - DTNS Weekend

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2:41This is the Daily Tech News Show weekend edition. I'm Tom Merritt, and I am very lucky this weekend to be joined by someone from C-SPAN to talk about their big carriage agreement. Now, you may have heard about this. We talked about it briefly before. C-SPAN is carried by cable TV and satellite TV, but it had not been carried by the streaming equivalent of that, except for DirecTV, which did carry C-SPAN on its streaming equivalent. But the big news is, of course, that there is now a deal for YouTube TV and Hulu Plus Live TV to carry C-SPAN. Here to talk about it is Peter Kiley, Senior Vice President, Chief revenue and product officer at C-SPAN.

3:23Peter, thank you for joining me. Tom, thank you. It's really kind of you to express an interest in this and give us a chance to talk about it with your audience. Well, it's important for people in the United States, but I even think beyond the United States, people will be interested in how this particular kind of deal works. If anyone doesn't know, C-SPAN covers the U.S. government. What's the log line for C-SPAN? Yeah, just a little bit of the basics on us. We're a rather small nonprofit media organization based here in Washington, D.C. We're a 501c3 nonprofit that is funded almost entirely by license fees paid by our distribution partners.

4:04We do a small amount of licensing of content to movies or documentaries and things. We have a modest amount of advertising on our website and we have advertising on our apps. But the great bulk of our revenue over a 46-year history of providing these three public service channels, C-SPAN that has the House of Representatives and lots of congressional administration procedures, C-SPAN 2, which is the Senate and more of the same, And C-SPAN 3, which gives us an outlet for when the House and Senator are in session or to do things like our book and history programming, the funding from that primarily has come from those distribution partners.

4:41We don't have any advertising on the television networks, so there's no chance for our distribution partners to recoup any of the revenue that we receive from them paying the license fee. They fund us out of a goodwill, corporate citizenship, public service, contribution to democracy and good media, right? So that has been a wonderful place for C-SPAN to be able to put cameras in rooms where the most important public policy is discussed and debated each day. Not every day is as riveting as some, but we think that's a really unique public service that the First Amendment allows. And we're incredibly proud to wear the white hat and put that into millions of American homes.

5:26Yeah, to make the public record available, right? To make it so that everyone can access it. To make it available not only on television to everyone, but then to archive it in a C-SPAN video library. So everything since the early 1980s is in this massive archive that's available to all. Oh, and one great example of the benefit of that is Howard Mortman's The Weekly Podcast, which I am a devotee of. I know he's in the room. I'm not just saying that because he's listening. But it is a great tour through that archive. And there's so much in there. So the carriage agreements for C-SPAN, as you explained, have been with cable and satellite companies, but they haven't been with the streaming TV equivalents, with the exception of DirecTV, up until now.

6:12Why did that take so long? What is the difference between an agreement with a YouTube TV or a Hulu? We've had very strong relationships with the cable and satellite guys. Cable dating back to the 70s and in those huge growth areas of cable TV going into the 90s. And in the 90s, the two satellite companies, DirecTV and Dish Network, launched their services. And there was some question, would C-SPAN be made available to these new competitors of the cable industry? And I think very sage leadership of the cable industry said it would not be smart politically, They're not going to be smart for business to restrict access to this public service from any distributor that's putting television into the marketplace.

6:59So we were allowed to go to DirecTV and Dish, and right away they signed up for our services. And for all those years since the mid-90s have been great partners. As the streamers came into business a handful of years ago, they were really looking at initially, I think, building something different. I'll let them characterize why it took so long. They could do it better than I. But I think that perhaps we were seen as too old school cable. We weren't really necessary. They didn't understand at first sort of the value equation that we brought because we weren't bringing them any revenue opportunity.

7:34We were just cost to them. Over time, we talked and talked and talked with them. We showed them the value that we have in terms of viewership and reach. We showed them the value that we have in the amount of live content we have. We have a lot of live programming, particularly across the three channels with that much real estate. We're able to show so much. And ultimately, they ended up getting some political pressure because as members of Congress realized that these growing platforms, and there were even some senators and House members that were subscribing to these new streaming services. and after subscribing, realizing that they didn't have C-SPAN, weren't too pleased about it.

8:15So as they became more vocal, that helped us raise more awareness within these organizations. And we were able to sit down and over the last few months, get these deals done. And now we're working on launch plans with both Hulu Plus Live TV and YouTube TV to get all three C-SPAN networks into their base package prior to the end of the year. Do you have plans for any of the smaller services, like a Sling or a Philo? Are those on the map as well? You know, we continue to talk to them. We've had a long and very good relationship with DISH. Sling is a very different kind of service for them and an even lower cost.

8:55I would love to be on there, of course. Part of our mission is to make this public service available to every American in one way or another. So certainly we would want distribution on there. We really targeted the two biggest because the relevance of being in all those homes. If you think, it's reported that they have somewhere maybe between 13 and 14 million subscribers combined. If you think about it in terms of number of people in those households, times it by three and a half, that's a really big part of America that we weren't on their televisions. And so the relevancy of being on those televisions and becoming a part of people's media diet that are on those platforms is really, really critical to C-SPAN.

9:38And to be perfectly honest, you know, the revenue is really important from getting the license fee from these companies because we peaked, C-SPAN peaked at around 100 million homes. about a decade ago, right there with ESPN and CNN and everybody else. We were in every cable and satellite television household. That number has now dropped for C-SPAN to around 50 million homes. And so that's a big revenue hit from us, not only relevancy of not being in those homes. Now that we've gathered back these two biggest and fastest growing streamers, we've brought a lot of equity to that and are pretty much in every home that subscribes to sort of a, I call it a traditional bundle of aggregated television programming networks.

10:23Yeah. I mean, you, you, you rose with the tide of cable TV and you had to make the jump the way we had to make the jump. And now we fortunately made the jump with the two largest. And as you say, direct, you mentioned in the lead in direct TV stream has had us on and has the channels and has all three of the services in their new news package. So this episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love.

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13:29Now, I know a lot of people listening to this or watching this are going to wonder, like, well, why do you need cable? Like, yeah, back in the 80s, that's how you got into people's homes. You could just stream this yourself. Is that an option? Is that something you considered? And if you did, what would that mean? Yeah, it's pretty tough. One, a lot of people think we're taxpayer funded. It's important to know that we're not, So they say, why do I have to pay for a government service twice? Well, we're not a government service. So that's key for people to understand. And our budgets are very modest.

14:05We're a very small group. There's only about 200 of us that do everything. That may sound like a lot of people unassociated with the media, but it's a really small group to do all that we do. And we have to have revenue coming in to fund it. So you look at different opportunities you could have. And a lot of people wish we had a direct-to-consumer offering. Love to have one. Maybe someday we will. But it's pretty tough to get the amount of money we need. How many subscribers would we need and how much would they have to pay? And then you have to say sort of for our operating budget today, to get to that number, you'd have to double it because you'd have to spend that much on marketing, right?

14:47It's a whole different kind of thing. And C-SPAN, day in and day out, is not attracting huge audience numbers. We have, you know, these highlight big days. We call them red flag days or tentpole days where it's a Supreme Court confirmation hearing. It's the president meeting in the Oval Office with a world leader where our audience is quite large. It's fantastic. It's up there. But day in and day out, the audience is rather small. So building up a business where you would fund this public service totally with a direct-to-consumer option is pretty hard. And we feel that we do provide some political value to the companies that distribute us.

15:31They're seen as good corporate citizens by leadership in this town for providing this public service and paying for it. Members of Congress feel very, very strongly about that, that it's the way that they get access to their constituents and voters. And there's a great deal of value there. So we love that relationship. And that's why we work with our, we call them our affiliates, the distribution companies that serve us into communities. And we work with them to get some value out of it through things that we do in the classroom or things we do in the community with them or events that we might hold here in Washington or promoting them to the audience saying, hey, these are good corporate citizens for providing this service.

16:10Yeah. So you're not going to start a Patreon? on you know we we're not we we have started uh a very modest campaign for small dollar donations um it's a value for value basically saying hey if you get some value out of this give some back yeah it's on our it's on our website uh it gets mentioned occasionally on tv just like for our anniversary we do a founder's day hey support and it's incredibly heartwarming because of the love we've got. It's a lot of$25 and$50 and$100 checks. I've been a viewer for many, many years. We have families that give money. We have families that give money on behalf of deceased grandparents and things and say, I grew up in a household where my mom watched C-SPAN every day and I hated it as a kid.

16:59Now she's gone and I'm a viewer and I want to give you this. And some people have been extraordinarily generous and giving a nice, nice dollar amounts to say it means a lot to me and I know how much it would mean to my mom. So that's been really great for us to hear from people in that way. I think, you know, there's so much uncertainty in the media business today and how networks are going to be funded in the future. You've probably talked about ESPN and their new app and all the things that they're doing. We're not all that dissimilar to that, right? We're trying to figure all that out as well.

17:32They have certain market powers and clout and big dollar opportunities that we don't, but we're paying attention to all the same business factors and all. And we'll, in essence, ride their coattails a little bit, but the same way they're sticking with the cable bundle, we're sticking with the cable bundle. But knowing that that funding might not be there five years from now, 10 years from now, 50 months, I don't know what the timing is. We're going to look at lots of different things. And one of the ones that we could go to and we're talking a lot about here right now is corporate philanthropy, foundations, wealthy individuals.

18:06Maybe there would be some sponsorships bought. We're trying to figure all that. It takes a few years to stand up a really robust effort like that. So we're just dipping our toe in, starting to talk to people, figure out what sort of a team we'd need to develop here to do that. But that might be a big part of our funding in the future. We think we need to make those steps now with such uncertainty what the distribution funding will be down the road. Yeah, it sounds to me like the challenge is you've got a devoted audience, but you also have to operate at scale, right? And you're trying to thread that needle.

18:41Yeah. As you're looking at the landscape and how consumer behavior is changing, and not that anybody really knows where that's going to end up. Are you looking at things like Netflix, Disney +, those kinds of streaming opportunities? Is there anything for C-SPAN there as well? You know, I think like most television consumers at home, I'm using Apple TV and I'm using Netflix and I'm using Amazon Prime and my house is a little unusual. We use them all. for one way or another. And because I'm in a side of the business, I want to be watching them and learn about that experience. So the short answer is yes, of course, I'd be interested in having C-SPAN a part of that packaging.

19:30They don't necessarily have like a linear television presence. So figuring that out, you know, is it access to lots of live events? Is it our linear three channels? I would love it if Netflix would pay us our modest license fee across the entire Netflix subscriber base the way our current affiliates, they pay us for all of their subscribers. That's probably not in Netflix's willingness to go that far. So figuring out those relationships, those business models is definitely in our minds. We'll talk to anybody. There is because I mentioned earlier, because of the amount of live content we have, that's a really great way to get people for these distributors to get people to come and stay within their environment.

20:19If they know they can get live, you know, and right now they have maybe some live sports events here and a few lives, but they don't have consistent live content. So I would talk to them about how C-SPAN networks can bring a lot of consistent live content to your platforms to keep people within your garden all day long because they just know they can come there and see things. I don't know whether that's going to resonate with them or not, but I'm very proud of the service we provide. I think that makes some business sense. There is a value to what we do. So, yeah, we'll take those conversations to them eventually for sure.

20:55This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

21:52and same-day delivery. Shop hair at Sephora and give your hair the upgrade it's been waiting for. And, you know, I hadn't thought about this till you were talking just now, but I wonder if there's an opportunity with those platform providers, right? Like an Apple TV, like a Roku, etc. You know, I'm sure you're open to anything if anybody's interested. We are wide open to those discussions, yes. Yeah, yeah. Before we wrap up, though, I think it's good to explain to people that that cable TV, streaming TV is not the only way to access C-SPAN. You sort of alluded to it earlier, but you've got a lot of other entry points in.

22:32Talk a little bit about the apps and podcasts and other services. We do. It's a fun time to be at C-SPAN because technology is getting us way beyond the cable dial, where the audience is generally older, which is fine. That's good. where older people have time to watch a lot of C-SPAN. And C-SPAN is certainly long-form programming. Some of our stuff is 6, 8, 10 hours long. Cory Booker went for, what, 25 hours, right? That's long form. So to be able to go on social platforms, we have grown to nearly 3 million followers on TikTok in the last year and a half. And this year we'll get more than a billion views of our content on TikTok, short-form clips of a minute to two or three minutes long.

23:17So that's really exciting of really reaching an audience there. And we do the same across other social platforms. We have a really robust, a terrific mobile app called C-SPAN Now. And it's just that, C-SPAN Now. It's the latest. You can watch all the live events on there. So if you're on the go, you can get to the things that are happening. We send push notifications to hundreds of thousands of people, and they will tune in right now, right then, as some breaking thing is happening on Capitol Hill or at the administration at the White House. That's really important. We have also launched a television, a connected TV app called C-SPAN Select.

23:56And currently it goes to our cable affiliates, Comcast, Charter, Cox, and Mediacom. So if you're a subscriber to their services or to their broadband services, you can access C-SPAN Select. And it looks, heck, it looks pretty much like a Netflix. It's carousels of content. It's just our stuff. So it's it's Congress. It's hearings. It's books. It's history. It's that sort of stuff. So those are really fun for us. They're relatively inexpensive to operate and they're a great way. It's not a cliche I love, but going where the eyeballs are of getting, you know, the audience where they're starting to consume content of being where those places are.

24:35And as part of what we're working on and getting the YouTube TV relationship, we're going to be working with them a lot on YouTube as well. We've for many years had a page on YouTube where C-SPAN posts clips and things. We do occasional live streams of some of those biggest events. We've got, I think, 1.6 million followers on YouTube. But we get a lot of events and a lot of clips that will get hundreds of thousands and even millions or a couple in cases, tens of millions of views on YouTube. So we're going to work with them over the coming months and years and hopefully establish a really strong long term relationship with our new friends at YouTube to provide more content there, to help them mine this video library that I mentioned.

25:19There's 300 ,000 hours of content in the C-SPAN video library. It's all digitized. It's all archived. It's searchable by keywords based off the transcripts of those interviews. The closed captioning becomes kind of a transcript. So YouTube has this incredible creator community. Right. Well, they don't really know about it. Haven't been exposed to the C-SPAN video library. But I'm very excited and eager to work with YouTube and meet their creators who are really into history and politics and educate them about what C-SPAN has available in that video library and then build some partnerships for them to do fun, creative, smart, educational, historical perspective kind of work.

26:02Kind of like Howard does. Howard is the king of it. Plays in the trails. Weekly he is. So we'll show them what Howard's done and boom, let them go to town in our video library, expose that content on YouTube. And I hope then introduce a whole new group of people and more viewers and more citizens, more people around the world to what C-SPAN has. Peter, thank you so much for being so generous with your time. Thank you for putting up with some of my wild questions here and helping us understand everything about this. I'm cheering for you. I am a consumer of C-SPAN content and hope it only gets bigger and better from here.

26:40Thank you so much. We love C-SPAN fans, so thank you for that. And it's great for us. This is an important time of growth for C-SPAN and sort of a rejuvenating time of relevancy. So we appreciate you letting us talk to your very smart audience about it. Thank you. And of course, if people want to find out, they're like, wait, this is the first time hearing about this, which, you know, maybe there's a couple. what's the best place to start? Well, you can look on our website. There's some press releases on our website that will tell you what's happening on. There's a good LA Times piece that sort of outlines what these deals are with both YouTube and Hulu.

27:20And then just sort of watch this space on our website or you'll help us spread the word once we get the launch dates. But we're talking to them now about specific launch dates. There's a lot of stuff that has to happen behind the scenes operationally, but we'll be up on both of those platforms before the end of the year. And it's just cspan.org? Just cspan.org. Yes. Fantastic. Peter, thank you so much for talking with me today. I really, really appreciate it. It's been fun, Tom. Thank you so much. That's it for this episode of Daily Tech News Show Weekend Edition. We'll be back with the news on Monday.

27:53Thanks again to Peter for joining me today. Thank you for supporting us at patreon.com slash DTNS. I'll talk to you soon.

28:05The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

28:32and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Do you have an app idea you keep meaning to build someday? Well, someday just got a deadline. Ship-a-ton is back. The world's biggest mobile hackathon brought to you by RevenueCap. It's simple. launch a brand new app between august 1st and september 30th and compete for over 1 million dollars in prizes win and your app could land on a billboard in times square forever enshrined