Like a puttering dad desperate to find something—anything!—to talk with his kids about during their mandatory monthly dinners together, cable TV company Versant has started loudly wondering if it shouldn’t maybe start getting into this “podcasts” thing it’s been hearing about. Specifically, The New York Times reports that Versant is looking into buying Vox Media’s podcast division, allowing the cable company to truly seize the future by breaking into the hottest media trend of the mid-2010s.
Technically, we guess it’s a little inaccurate to describe Versant as an old fogey, in so far as the company itself is extremely young—having been spun off earlier this year from NBCUniversal, when the larger company looked around at the media landscape and realized how uncool owning cable networks had become. But the brand is decidedly “old media,” jamming together MS NOW, CNBC, and Golf Channel alongside slightly less moribund properties like USA, E!, Syfy, and Oxygen. (They also own Rotten Tomatoes, really solidifying that “cutting edge of the distant past” appearance.)
Vox revealed that it was thinking about selling off its 40-show-strong podcast division last year, and Versant has reportedly been sniffing around, part of a stated plan to start making money from things that are not TV channels whose depended-upon ad demographics include “people who tend to fall asleep while watching us.” The Vox library of shows includes Pivot, Criminal, Good One, and several others, serving up a blend of outside acquisitions, shows based on Vox’s existing media brand, and personality-driven podcasts from the likes of Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. Which is to say, nothing operating at the “Joe Rogan somehow decides who we end up going to war with” level, but still pretty successful and profitable, especially compared to the rest of the digital media landscape. (Of which Vox is one of the last big independent survivors.) Interestingly, Semafor reported last week that Vox was taking its podcast network off the market; it’s unclear if that was some kind of bluff, or just letting everybody know that it’d now found a deep-pocketed buyer like Versant to take it off its hands.
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