Les Moonves: Cord Cutters Are Not A Problem For CBS

Media behemoths from Comcast to Disney say they’ve been hit by cord cutting, but CBS’ Les Moonves claims that’s not his company’s problem, according to The NYPost.

“This movement is a positive for us,” the CEO said Thursday at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia media conference. “We’re different from them.”

Les Moonves

As an example, Moonves estimated that CBS gets $2 a month for each subscriber from a traditional cable company carrying his network, $4 from a skinny bundle and $6 from an over-the-top delivery system.

“[Cord cutters] are not disappearing … They’re just going to other services,” he said.

Moonves said there’s upside, as CBS is still playing catch up on the retransmission fees that cable operators and other multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) pay broadcast networks to carry their programming.

He noted that the $2 per-subscriber fee collected by CBS compares to about $7 for ESPN.

That means CBS collects only 2 percent of the country’s retrans revenue — yet it provides 10 percent of the viewership.

“We’re going to make up that gap,” Moonves said.

Using the CBS hit “Bull” as an example, Moonves put its live audience at 10 million, its audience including three days of delayed viewing at 14 million, its seven-day audience at 16 million and its 35-day audience at more than 18 million — making for an 80 percent increase.

“The better Nielsen gets, the better we get,” he said of the audience-measurement giant.

“The OTT consumer is 20 years younger,” he said, which further distances CBS from the “geezer network” reputation that Moonves insists became obsolete years ago.