Howard Stern announced a few days before Christmas that he's staying put at SiriusXM (SIRI) instead of bolting to start his own company using so-called "Over The Top" broadcasting technology.
It's easy to see why Stern made that decision. Sirius is likely paying him $80 million a year or more, guaranteed for the next five years. The "shock jock" also inked a 12-year deal to license tapes of 30 years worth of old Stern shows to Sirius for even more money. Put it together and you have a situation where Sirius offered Stern high reward and very low risk, which is probably why he's staying put.
What's interesting is that even though OTT seems like it's just waiting to take off in a big way, very few stars are opting to try it. Stern stayed out, while sportscaster Bill Simmons went to HBO instead of doing something himself via OTT (although Simmons does have flexibility to build his own OTT network over time).
The one poster child for OTT success seems to be conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck. However, some of his top people have recently left. Do they know something we don't?
Without Beck, there aren't many big OTT successes to point to other than Netflix (NFLX). Maybe OTT will only have a couple of big winners, like Vice and BuzzFeed in the media world.
But more likely, OTT will simply become the home of future entertainment stars, not the ones we know from the last 10 to 30 years. I'm thinking of all of the YouTube stars that I've never heard of because I'm too old. Maybe they'll have their own OTT channels.
OTT does look like the future. It just doesn't look like it'll be the future in 2016.
