Don’t Look Now, but the Great Unbundling Has Spun into Reverse
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Meanwhile, video streaming services have almost no catalog overlap, and genuinely do represent the return of cable-style bundling. Even beyond Amazon- or Netflix-produced content, the world of general film and TV content licensing is such that it's rare for a film or show to even appear on two of the top-tier services.
The article starts off with "No longer would anyone have to buy a $99-a-month triple-play package when all they wanted was the History Channel." And ends with, "the bundle is not a decaying symbol of legacy distribution. Rather, it is the new network effect: a critical strategy to amplify scale in the hope of building or deepening a moat to protect against foes everywhere."
I guess business school elites, like the author, are having a hard time wrapping their minds around what is taking place. It is pretty simple for me; Consumers want more choice and want it for less money on a monthly basis. They are more realistic about how much time they can devote to watching and/or listening to content which reflects in the winners and losers of this space. Further, the proliferation of Android set top boxes, Fire sticks, Kodi boxes, Chromecasts, and Rokus together with youtube and other streaming/free content will continue to erode all of the above.
Youtube recommendations occasionally put me onto a new content creator/creation group that adds to my regular viewing. Much of this is both educational (how-to videos) and entertaining. Finding something with the right mix of educational impact and entertainment value is, IMHO, far rarer.
The rate of new (albeit shorter duration) content on Youtube seems to outpace the rate of content I want to watch from the TV/Movie streaming services.
https://www.youtube.com/user/aquachigger/videos
Or how to survive in the Canadian wilderness
https://www.youtube.com/user/josephallen19/videos
Or get entirely too deep into Dark Souls lore
Any pointers would be greatly appreciated!
The engineer: https://www.youtube.com/user/Matthiaswandel
And the madman: https://www.youtube.com/user/stevinmarin
I also wrote up a short article aimed at beginners like myself that points to other kinds of resources: http://www.smokingonabike.com/2017/01/01/hand-tools-for-a-ne...
I have begun to appreciate YouTube suggestions. They aren't so bad.
If that were true for a large number of customers, the perk wouldn't exist.
Amazon is the "Everything Store" and Prime is the "Everything program". It's clearly bundling Every part of it reinforces loyalty to Amazon in unrelated sectors, from books to electronics to music to movies to more.
Do they really expect me to spend $80+ in order to introduce starwars to my kids while my father bough them on VHS and my brother on DVD? (And that not even counting all the merch bough alongside...)
It is also interesting when thinking about WHY people get so attached to the idea of 'unbundling', even when it might not be in their best interest. I think most people look at some of the large cable bundles, for example, and think "man, I am paying for so many things I don't watch!" What they don't realize is that even if the channels they didn't watch were removed, the cable company wouldn't be able to charge them much less, since the marginal cost for additional channels is near zero.
Cable companies caused the demand for de-bundling via a partial de-bundling. If you could get all channels for $50 then nobody would complain. But if they force you to buy half the channels for $25 and half the channels for $25, people start to wonder why they can't just get a quarter of the channels for $12.50.
With the old networks, a lot of the decisions about what to make are based on advertising. For now, Netflix can decide what to make based on accurate viewing stats and their only motivation is to increase and retain subscriptions. As long as things stay that way, they are motivated to prioritise good content, which is a step in the right direction.
I do worry however, that they still need to serve a lowest common denominator mass market, so bundling leads us back to where we started, with a few high quality exclusives per channel (e.g., Stanger Things, Game of Thrones, Mr Robot), but ultimately we're still paying for a lot of unwanted garbage.
With this model, the "channels" aren't incentivised to do what IMO they should be: curating high quality content to specific demographics (anime fan, sci-fi fans, romcom fans, etc). Instead, they will just do the minimum needed to retain each of them, while not really doing a very good job for any of them.
But how do you breathe while watching those shows?
(edit: grammar)
It's the idea that you're spending money with a specific action vs spending in general to get access to something where you could theoretically have as much as you want. It's the all-you-can-eat seafood buffet in Vegas. You feel like you're beating the house, but the house always wins. In this case though, consumers also win, because it's ~$15/month with no ads and no BS vs $50-120+ a month with Comcast or DirectTV for ads + waiting to watch what you want + contracts (Comcast does e.g. 1-year contracts in some markets) + lots of BS (Comcast also "rents" movies and does things like pay-per-view). The house can still win while providing an order of magnitude better value, but the old business model exists due to their oligopoly and regulatory capture.
My current "system" is to pay Netflix year-round and to subscribe to HBO Now when GOT is released (and catch up on other HBO content at that time) and cancel when it concludes.
I wish Amazon and Apple would get their shit together and allow/provide Amazon Video on Apple devices. That would fill in any gaps for no additional cost (I already pay for Prime for shipping benefits).
Is this really true? Setting aside barney54's ESPN example, I'd think that the emphasis in our current society on monetizing intellectual property would impose an artificial marginal cost for many service providers.
I've never worked _in_ any of the major networks or cable companies, so I could be entirely wrong, but the idea that channels present a low marginal cost to networks goes against my intuition when contrasted against e.g. Netflix/Hulu/Amazon's tendencies to cycle shows and films for cost cutting.
[1] http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Germany/Uni...
(First Class Mail package is a little over $2 for 2 ounces.)
A letter will take anywhere from a day to 3-5 days in the country, depending on where you are mailing to and from. This is mostly due to the expanse of the country. Boxes generally take a bit longer, and you pay for priority instead of just waiting until their load is big enough. In addition, a good number of places only work during the week to ship it out. This along with other upfront delays make it go a bit longer as well.
Oddly enough, sometimes you get packages from overseas before you get a domestic package, even though the quoted mailing time was longer.
Nearly as good as Prime, no subscription. I've almost entirely switched from Amazon.
It's not that it's cheap, but that it scales relatively quickly.
I don't know how much service providers pay to carry these channels though. I'd imagine advertising is still what covers most costs.
There can be some other conditions, e.g. if you distribute it to less than 100k subscribers then you still pay for a full 100k; or you pay $x for every subscriber that you have, no matter if you show them our channel or not; or you can distribute the nice channel A only to customers who also have our (not so nice) channels B, C and D, etc... but the core principle is that you do pay for content per subscriber.
Furthermore, the big content companies produce a lot of content in all genres, and they're (obviously) focused on their average revenue per user - and if they can get $x ARPU for their bundles, where the demand is driven by a few key channels (e.g. they expect everyone who wants A or B to pay for the whole bundle) then any a la carte unbundled packaging that would allow A or B separately makes business sense only if the a la carte customers would on average pay at least as much as the whole bundle costs. There's no extra cost to the content owner to give the whole bundle, rather the other way around (your 'shit channels' can get more advertising revenue since some of those who got it in a bundle would watch it a bit), but there is a loss of revenue if you start paying less for the channels that you do want.
Advertising covers the costs for the many shitty channels, those can be got/distributed nearly for free, but things that people actually want on their cable are quite costly, especially sports.
I was thinking more about production costs, of course it makes sense to sell the content based on number of viewers. I'm not very aware of who pays what though.
In an alternative universe cable would work like the internet: content carriers. Netflix is basically the most popular thing (normalized for traffic) and even they are basically paying ISPs to help get served better.
Comcast is charging to put data into their tube, and charging for access to the tube. They get paid on both ends. They can do this because they have no competition in most markets and there is little will in Washington to make this situation better for Americans.
Edit: also, get ready for Ajit Pai's FCC where Comcast, Verizon, ATT, TimeWarner, etc will be allowed to "zero rate" "select" services (read: when services pay their ransom). Data caps and speeds for the "regular" internet will go down without this, and first-party offerings from the ISPs will of course be exempt from the caps.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2016/11/att-time-... it's already happening. ISPs refuse to be dumb pipes and want to open additional revenue channels by figuring out creative new ways to charge everyone for moving bits across their network. They will continue unchecked and without meaningful competition.
Being undifferentiated, dumb operators of flying tubes left US airlines in a precarious state. As wireless grows increasingly competitive with wireline services, the telecoms will find themselves in the exact same place.
Netflix _could_ just rely on the standard infrastructure like everyone else, but doesn't want to because it would provide sub-standard quality. So they also have their own "ISP" that hooks into Comcast and co.
This is less like Comcast + a website, and more like Comcast + another ISP. The dynamics are different.
I'd probably pay Netflix $100/mo if they could deliver everything I would want to watch in streaming format without commercials. As it is, I pay Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and HBO. I don't pay Comcast for cable but I'm paying nearly the same for all the services I subscribe to.
I save over $70 a month in fees by subscribing to Hulu, Netflix, Sling, CBS All Access, and Amazon Prime. Most of the savings is by not having to rent 5 extra set top boxes.
Sometimes, yes, but sometimes it's basically a scam that relies on consumers having few options and low negotiating power.
Companies always want to come as close as possible to charging you without providing anything in return. Phone companies prefer to charge you for potential minutes for month, rather than actual minutes used, as then customers pay for the purely theoretical unused minutes. Cable companies prefer to bundle channels because you have to pay for the ones you don't watch.
Considering it's only $10/month, and there are a lot of digital services offered for this money, very little(maybe $2/month per user) is left to support the e-commerce business. Is that such a big deal, in a fight against Walmart, which itself can play that cross-subsidy game, using your grocery bill ?
Yet, today, there is an inexorable consumer shift to all-you-can-eat bundles of music.
Well, music often comes out as thematic albums, I don't see a problem with that. There are good stores where you can buy albums, and individual tracks as well if you choose. Bandcamp for instance indicated they are gradually growing, so there is clearly a market for that.
I do most of my streaming through a set-top device, so I add credentials once, and ... that's it. If I happen to watch through a browser, then there are password managers, which seems like an appropriate solution for the few that choose to do this.
If there were a 'manager' that streamlined all of this, that would be great, but a 'bundler' by definition doesn't let me pick and choose services.
Does it matter? Last I checked, the GP's criticisms apply to electronic bills as well.
Credit cards make the situation significantly worse, since now you're managing your credit card information (which expires every few years) across 20 sites instead of 1. That's 20 sites that could fall victim to database theft. That's 20 sites that you'd have to trust to not be the thieves themselves. At the very least, that's 20 sites where you'd have to continually update the card numbers and expiration dates and CVVs.
One can mitigate the credit card issue by using some "trusted" payment system like PayPal, but you're then still verifying 20 different bills each month, checking them against your PayPal/CC/bank statements, inspecting them for discrepancies, etc. That's made significantly easier when you only need to worry about a single large bill.
I agree that a sort of "manager" would be nice. Perhaps some sort of marketplace or metaservice for multimedia subscriptions, where it would combine each service's monthly (or perhaps yearly) cost into a single bill with a single payment method, all itemized and unified.
Apple will also do the billing for streaming services that you sign up for via its apps.
https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8FRL9.h...