Versant and AMC Global Media Plot Their Escape Routes From Linear TV

By Priya Raman

AMC Global Media's streaming portfolio has reached "about 11 to 12 million" subscribers, CEO Kristin Dolan said Tuesday at the Paley International Council Summit in New York — but she argued subscriber counts no longer define success. "It's all about engagement," Dolan said. "[It's] an interesting metric that in streaming we're still figuring out because is it time spent or is it time spent well?"

The first day of the summit gave two programmers — Versant and AMC Global Media — a stage to explain how they are offsetting continued declines in traditional linear TV. Their answers differ sharply, and both carry lessons for marketers watching where audiences and ad dollars are heading.

What does Versant's vertical strategy change?

Versant CEO Mark Lazarus, whose company spun off from NBCUniversal in January, said the programmer is rethinking its legacy cable networks, including CNBC and MS Now, as consumer brands rather than "just media brands."

"Our ability to take these consumer brands and build around them with adjacent or supplementary businesses will allow us to grow the businesses," Lazarus said during a Tuesday afternoon session. "Not necessarily grow our revenue streams against linear television, which has downward pressure, but grow in the verticals that we live in, which are golf, personal finance and business news, news and political opinion, entertainment and sports. And then transactional businesses like Fandango."

The consumer-first approach is already visible:

• The $7.99/month MS Now Membership lets highly engaged viewers interact directly with the news brand's journalists.
• An AI-powered CNBC direct-to-consumer product for retail investors is slated to launch later this year.
• The golf vertical now spans Golf Channel, the tee time business GolfNow, the instruction service GolfPass and simulator company Full Swing.

"When you put that together as a golf business, we are very much not in the golf media business. It's part of it, but we're in the golf business, and that's the model for what we're going to do across the rest of the verticals," Lazarus said.

How is AMCGM managing the shift to streaming?

Dolan repositioned AMCGM as a streaming company last year, and that transformation has pushed the programmer to weigh the end-to-end viewing experience as heavily as content quality.

"We just used to make beautiful shows and send them up to a satellite, and then it was somebody else's problem to bring them down and facilitate a really good user experience. But now we really have to think end-to-end," Dolan said during a Tuesday morning conversation. "So how do you enable a seamless authentication experience for your embedded bundle with somebody like Charter, or how do you make sure your DTC is optimized or that your relationship with Apple, Amazon or YouTube works seamlessly? That's part of the job now."

The technical cost adds up across partnerships. "We currently deliver to 100 different endpoints. So what does that mean? That means the files that go to Amazon are different from the files that go into the Charter bundle, that go to Apple, that go to Philo," Dolan said.

The company has spent three years migrating its entire technical backend to Comcast Technology Solutions and the streaming front end to Deltatre. The payoff is cost clarity: "I know what it costs me to put the product on the street, and that helps me then manage the margins so that I can prioritize the bulk of the expense around content and then marketing and promotion of the content," Dolan said.

What do the numbers say about cable's trajectory?

Bundled AMC+ activations through Charter and Philo reached 2.3 million as of July, a figure Dolan has highlighted on recent earnings calls. The number also includes activations of AllBlk, which the programmer sold to media company Macro in September.

Affiliate revenue still tells the harder story: it declined 17% year over year to $126 million in 2Q26. Dolan referenced a recent MoffettNathanson note projecting U.S. cable TV churn will level off at around 50 million by 2030. "Everybody knock on wood and cross your fingers," she said.

For marketers, the practical question is where each company's engagement now lives: Versant is building commerce and subscription products around brand verticals, while AMCGM is consolidating streaming infrastructure to protect content and marketing budgets. Both paths assume the cable base keeps shrinking — and both CEOs are budgeting accordingly.