Most everyone here knows that I worked for one of the major cable TV operators in the country. I was in charge of all video data for the company as well as some other unusual things that came under my control like ownership of control trucks, etc.

I was even almost arrested when we shot some advertising at a car dealer in a desert city and we sent up the drone without an FAA permit and the authorities in that southwestern city called me in Atlanta with some very threatening language.

Full disclosure - as I noticed that our subscriber base was decreasing dramatically and as the company decided to outsource video operations to a peer company, I saw the writing on the wall that my job was becoming expendable and I made the decision to leave and go back into data and analytics consulting where things are going very well.

In my role, I owned all video data for the company and I also owned all of our video consumption data. That is a very sexy way of saying that every time someone changed the channel on their cable box, we captured that event and constructed video viewership analyses for multiple customer personas and micro segments.

Where I had a blind spot was when our customer would authenticate in to an app from one of the content providers, like TNT or TBS or ESPN. We visited with the CTO of a cable network and we had great discussions on how we would combine our data sets to get a complete picture of the viewership experience from cable box to app and back.

When the content negotiators found out what we were trying to do, we got shut down. Our negotiators thought that this was an effort to try to reduce content cost on our system due to this data sharing, which was completely untrue. Unfortunately, so much paranoia came into the discussions that we shot down what was a great idea.

The reason I chose to share this story is to illuminate you on how nasty these negotiations can be and how bare-knuckled they can become. The reason as to why I remain bullish on why all of the players will come together is that everyone wants this negotiation to be successful. The cable and satellite companies want the network because their subs want it. Disney wants to sell it because they will make a bunch of money and the ACC will make a bunch of money. All that is left to do is to get the final numbers negotiated.

The Charter announcement was a big domino to fall and as I have maintained all along, the others will fall too over the next 2 weeks.