Several people have noted to us that Comcast, the largest cable provider in the United States, has moved Pop TV to a higher cable package. This means that many fans of TNA and Pop TV will have to upgrade their cable package if they want to watch TNA on Pop. This is obviously bad news since TNA and Pop have been touting the fact that they were available to 80+ million homes.
Last week’s debut episode on Pop drew just 255,000 viewers. That was less than what they were averaging on Destination America and, what makes those numbers even worse, is that Destination America (60 million homes) was available in fewer homes than Pop TV. Pop TV network president Brad Schwartz has talked about the numbers that TNA was pulling on Spike TV but it does not seem like they will be anywhere close to those numbers for a long time…if ever.
“This is an event that just 12 months ago was doing 1.3 million viewers every week on Spike,” Schwartz told the Associated Press last week. “It’s something you have to watch every week. It’s appointment TV. It’s not something you can watch on Netflix three years from now.”
Here is the official statement from Comcast:
“In December 2015 and January 2016 we will be making changes to our channel lineup in select areas. CMT, Spike TV and POP will be moving to different tiers of service and in some areas RLTV will no longer be carried. We are making these changes to manage overall programming costs and better align our more popular packages with the most viewed programs. These changes do not affect all areas, so please refer to the grid below to see if your area will have a tier change for one of these networks.”
