Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Comedian George Carlin had a routine in the 1970s that he called “the seven words you cannot say on television”. The gag was about the US Federal Communications Commission’s ability to restrict speech transmitted on public airwaves. Licensed TV and radio broadcasters had a choice: comply or lose their precious, government-owned spectrum.
One might think that in the age of streaming, with broadcast TV now less than one-fifth of all viewing, according to Nielsen, the FCC’s leverage over Hollywood would be much diminished. Walt Disney may soon find out. The FCC plans to review the media giant’s licences, because late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel told a joke on its ABC network that offended President Trump.
The FCC was set up in the 1930s to police then-common media oligopolies — not to protect any particular president’s feelings. In practice, that is probably little comfort to new Disney chief Josh D’Amaro, who will now have to spearhead the fight. The wrinkle: that Disney’s over-the-air channels were dying a slow death anyway.
Some of TV’s most magic moments are now also viewable online. ABC for decades hosted the Oscars, but from 2029, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has given the rights to Google’s video platform YouTube. Sports games, which a viewer could once find by flicking through terrestrial channels, now appear — at an extra cost — on Netflix and Amazon.
Revenue at Disney’s “linear networks” business, which also includes some of its cable-TV channels, fell by more than a tenth in 2025. Analysts expect it to shrink by 7 per cent this year, according to Visible Alpha, at which point it would make up less than 10 per cent of the company’s revenue. That comes from selling ads in shows, and fees from cable and satellite operators who include ABC local channels in their packages.
The catch is that old-style TV is quite profitable, representing nearly a fifth of Disney’s group operating profit of $17.5bn. That’s a stark contrast with streaming service Disney+, which generated a little more than $1bn in profit last year, on $25bn of revenue, and had over the previous five years produced about $8bn of operating losses.
FCC chair Brendan Carr is an odd enemy, because he has fretted openly about sports shifting to subscription-based streaming platforms, protesting that “public interest is no longer being served”. One company that would agree might be Paramount Skydance, run by Trump ally David Ellison, whose CBS is even more dependent on live sports than Disney.
Disney can’t easily afford to ditch its profitable linear networks, which limits its ability to defy the FCC. Digital-only players, on the other hand, can be more cavalier. Disney will be thrilled when the economics of Disney+ work well enough that it can share their privilege.
[email protected]
