Welcome to What I’m Hearing+, back at you from the wilds of Brooklyn where I’m recovering from watching The Cure perform a two-hour set in a mud-filled park in Chicago after a torrential downpour. I regret nothing.

Today, a closer look at the lessons and aftershocks of the Charter-Disney deal, and what it presages about future dealmaking and rights negotiations.

But first…

• On Bullshit Metrics…: Two thoughts keep me up at night: First, that the value of digital advertising is essentially dependent on the value of underlying viewership metrics; and second, that most of those metrics are bullshit. As John Herrman recently noted in New York, nearly every platform has its own definition of a “view,” meaning that there’s no cross-platform metric to assign monetary value to similar behaviors. Is a view on TikTok worth more than a view on Twitter/X? Netflix used to define a view as two minutes watched; now it’s the collective time a movie or TV show is streamed divided by the title’s runtime. So it’s not a view so much as a theoretical completed view (something analysts have used for years to guess potential viewership of a Netflix title). It’s arguably even murkier because views are now conflated with total viewership and that’s not correct. There’s no agreed upon standard.

  Defining these terms is more important than ever now that streaming, a format that began in an ad-free universe, is now increasingly dependent on advertising. And, of course, these streaming platforms—particularly the second and third generation offerings—aren’t simply competing with each other. They are also competing with YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch.

  To be sure, I don’t see a world in which a view on Netflix is benchmarked to a view on TikTok. These platforms cater to different audiences and demos, all with different needs. But advertising, a complex and relationship-driven business (just like the entertainment industry), is about to get a lot more complicated as marketers attempt to make sense of the shape-shifting playing field. To wit: Is 40 million views on Twitter/X the same as 20 million completed streams on Disney+? No. Are those impacts different? Absolutely. So why are we still using the same language, mostly for advertisers and content suppliers or content creators’ sake, to apply the same theory of value?

  Nielsen became such a powerful industrial benchmark because it allowed advertisers to understand the reach of their creative and estimate the impact of their spend. Sure, more streaming services are participating in Nielsen, but Nielsen is no longer capturing fully accurate consumption data, and services like ESPN+—which have an inflated subscriber count compared to usage—aren’t measured. And that’s just one example.

  As the streaming industry matures, and inevitably consolidates, the ambiguity around the value of a view will eventually come to a head. How much is a view worth? And even more existentially, what is a view? Tech companies and linear players are now colliding faster than ever, and the B.S. will increasingly become a blocker for large deals. But, as is usually the case, new standard metrics of success will likely be defined by the most successful companies. It’s another reason why the race into advertising is occuring far faster than any of us ever fathomed.

The deal, which gave Charter customers reduced-price access to the Disney streaming bundle, wasn’t unprecedented: Charter already struck a similar deal with Paramount, Spectrum customers also get Peacock free for a limited time, etcetera. While Paramount+ and Peacock technically exist as retail options, the parent companies’ overall strategy is more in line with wholesalers.

Disney, however, wanted to morph from a wholesaler into a retailer—to own the relationship with its customers and cut out as many transaction participants as possible. Taking on Charter was a sign of its ambition; its capitulation to Charter’s requests was a sign that the company doesn’t have the leverage to cut out the cable companies, at least not yet. More specifically, Disney can’t yet build a fully scaled direct-to-consumer business without the advantage of the reach and revenue that cable companies provide.

Here’s what else the Disney-Charter battle revealed:

For Disney’s D.T.C. products to reach similar scale, it needs strategic partners to help grow its audience. Central to the early success of Netflix was its partnerships with the likes of T-Mobile, which gave a new group of customers access to the service, and its deals to buy physical space on TV remotes belonging to Amazon (Fire TV), Google (Chromecast with Google TV), Nvidia, Sony (PlayStation), and others. This was key to making Netflix a default, priority option for a new wave of customers as they cut the cord. Netflix doesn’t get enough credit for using these moves to create phantom behaviors in customers—a feeling of being so used to doing something, that it becomes second nature.

It’s not a quick or easy pivot. Almost everyone in streaming is now trying to push customers toward ad tiers, but it takes time to change consumer habits and educate them about new options. Only two streaming companies had more than 50 percent of signups choose the ad-supported tier in the first six months of 2023, according to Antenna: Peacock (69 percent) and Hulu (58 percent). Max saw just 21 percent of customers choose the ad tier, while just 17 percent of new Netflix subscribers chose the cheaper option.

Disney+ has seen only about a third of new signups picking ads. Disney doesn’t break out advertising revenue for Disney+ yet, but the company’s latest earnings noted that ARPU for Disney+ domestic subscribers increased from $7.14 to $7.31 “due to higher per-subscriber advertising revenue.” Now, with Charter, Disney may see anywhere from 11 to 13 million new Disney+ subscribers through the 14 million Charter customers now made available. (We have to assume that at least some of these Charter subscribers had Disney+, and some won’t want ad-supported options.) By partnering with Charter, Disney won’t own the relationship with its customers, but it will reach more of them—helping to further monetize those customers at scale.

Remember, there’s a reason that Netflix doesn’t allow customers to sign up via the App Store or Google Play. To do so would allow Apple and Google to take up to 30 percent of the signup and a percentage of monthly subscription revenue for the first year. More poignantly, what would Netflix lose by allowing itself to become just another offering on a rival company’s app marketplace?

Consider that in 2018, around 75 percent of all Netflix sign ups were on web browsers on computers, smartphones, or tablets. The vast majority of viewing six months after signing up, however, is done on TV sets, according to Netflix data cited by analyst Matthew Ball. That tells us that habits are formed on traditional TV screens, but access to those platforms comes from other devices. This is why companies like Paramount and Warner Discovery work with intermediaries like Apple and Amazon to scale their platforms. It’s not just about reducing churn; it’s about finding subscribers through every avenue possible.

Furthermore, these intermediaries also carry channels (Amazon Prime Video Channels, Apple TV) that allow customers to create their own ecosystem. Sure, Apple TV devices aren’t in the vast majority of households, but the idea isn’t too dissimilar from utility players like Charter and Comcast. Look at Amazon: if you want the vast majority of your TV services, plus access to Prime Video, Prime Retail, Prime Music, Freevee, and Twitch, all on one device (a Fire TV stick or an Amazon TV), it can be as simple as one click.

The core difference as it stands today is that companies like Disney and Warner Discovery license their content wholesale to Charter and Cox and Comcast for a spectacular fee in exchange for reach. That doesn’t happen currently with Amazon or Apple —yet— and it certainly doesn’t happen with their streaming content. I noted a while back that the future of TV seems more and more likely to be YouTube, where the vast majority of streaming viewing happens in the U.S., according to Nielsen.

After all, YouTube’s main app made up nearly 10 percent of all streaming viewing time in July, and that doesn’t even account for YouTube TV, which Nielsen includes in its broadcast and cable viewing. YouTube TV is also one of the fastest growing vMVPDs in the U.S., beating out Hulu + Live TV, Sling TV, and Fubo TV.

It isn’t too far of a stretch to imagine a near future in which Disney wants to create a similar partnership for its Disney+ ad-based tier on the cord cutters' go-to Pay TV replacement. The infrastructure is certainly there—look at the improvements YouTube TV has already made to Sunday Ticket. Just replace traditional carriage disputes with fights over ad inventory percentages and sign up feed (similar to what played out between Roku and WBD/NBCUniversal in 2020 when Max and Peacock rolled out). Fights over reaching the most people in the right way won’t just stop when cable distribution rolls into internet distribution, but the players may look a little different.