You're correct and that has been the case for a long while. For the past few years, viewers of NBC have been seeing ads for Peacock. During the past few Olympic games, they heavily pushed Peacock as an option for watching the games. For about as long, when you'd watch most any program on the Discovery networks (HGTV, Animal Planet, Discovery, Travel Channel, Food Network, etc.) they would often show commercials featuring some really interesting and appealing looking programming, followed by the message that, if you wanted to see those things and more, you had to subscribe to Discovery+ and stream them.
I think the 2 articles in the OP above and the comments by
@crainbebo and
@KeithE4 illustrate how difficult things have become financially for "traditional" CATV and Dish providers and it's kind of a downward spiral at this point. Comcast, Spectra, DirectTV and other providers are hurting because they've had to continuously raise the costs of their monthly subscriptions to cover carriage fees that they're paying to all the networks and stations they carry, but also maintaining and upgrading their distribution systems, which comes at a cost. Partly as a result of those increased subscription prices, several million have "cut the cord". That means CATV and similar companies are taking in less, but yet networks like ESPN, FX and ABC (Disney) and Nexstar (nearly 160 Nexstar owned stations) keep demanding more $$ in carriage fees to cover their own rising costs, and that's resulted in what we're now seeing - Carriage disputes between Disney and Spectrum causing all those channels to go dark, and the carriage dispute between Nexstar and DirecTV causing all those stations to be pulled from that service until a deal is negotiated.
CATV and Dish providers are stuck in a cycle of rising costs and falling subscriptions. Companies like Nexstar and ESPN who have traditionally made a lot of $$ from those providers in carriage fees to help pay their bills are now in disputes and their channels are going dark.
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