TV’s “Great Reunion” isn’t what you think

Ever since I wrote about cord cutting, people insisted that the whole effort was pointless.

Ah, but you don’t really want to choose your own streaming servicesthese wise industry watchers told us. What you really want is one big subscription that ties everything together—you know, like cable TV.

That attitude appears to be the driving force behind “The Great Rebundling,” an industry buzzword that suggests a return to cable-style bundling for streaming services. The term appeared most recently in a Wall Street Journal story last week that suggested that the thing I hated most about cable was now making a comeback.

A closer look reveals that this claim is false. Despite what you may have read, consumer choice in streaming TV remains alive and well.

The regrouping that wasn’t

given WSJ influence, I feel compelled to play media critic for a moment and dig a little deeper into the claims of this story.

Let’s start with the title: “You hated your cable package. Your streaming services bring it back.”

That sounds pretty scary, especially if you’ve ditched cable to get more control over your TV spending. But reading the actual story, it’s really just a mash-up of a handful of developments that don’t look like a revival of cable’s business model:

• Amazon, which already offers a marketplace for video services, has reportedly considered bundling some of them together at a discount. It’s a nice idea, provided it’s optional, but the most popular streaming services aren’t available through Amazon’s marketplace to begin with, so any bundling options will be limited. (Amazon executives have also talked about potential bundle deals for years, and nothing has come of it.)
• It has been reported that Warner Bros. Discovery has discussed working with rival streaming services on some kind of package, but Newspaper the story offered no specifics. Meanwhile, CNBC’s Alex Sherman reported last week that this kind of intercompany merger is unlikely to happen anytime soon, noting that NBCUniversal recently approached some competitors with the idea and was rebuffed by nearly all.
• As we saw with the wireless carrier streaming deals, some companies outside the TV business offer free or low-cost streaming services to their customers. However, this is not a new trend and is more of a replacement for double or triple play cable deals than a recreation of cable channel bundling.

Even the Journal seems to admit that its reporting doesn’t support its headline, noting six paragraphs into it that “no one in the streaming industry expects to bundle all the major services together into a $100-a-month package.” But if you only read the headline , you’ve skimmed through history or been blocked by a paywall, you may have gotten a completely different impression.

A bad packaging trend

If there’s one consumer-hostile trend to watch out for, it’s streaming service consolidation.

Warner Bros. Discovery, for example, has indicated that it will combine its HBO Max and Discovery+ streaming services in 2023, and may also raise prices — the all-too-predictable result of a merger between those services’ parent companies. Paramount is also considering merging its Paramount+ and Showtime services, and Disney’s CEO has floated the idea of ​​a “solid bundle” for Disney+ and Hulu.

This kind of mandatory intercompany merger would be bad for consumers, which is why I opposed the senseless industry megamergers that make it possible.

But at the end of the day, these companies still have to answer directly to customers and may find that mandatory bundling doesn’t work as well as it did in the cable era. The Disney bundle is successful, for example, because people can see the value compared to paying separately for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+. When a la carte options disappear, so does the perceived value of bundled services all together. And with so many TV options, streamers can only push their customers so far before they cancel their subscriptions.

People want choice

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with bundling per se. If the TV industry could package its services in ways that save customers money while maintaining flexibility, that would be great.

But all signs point to that not happening. With cable, for example, TV networks had numerous chances to adopt smaller, more flexible packages that would keep customers happy and slow the decline of cable. At every turn, they choose larger, less flexible and more expensive packages instead.

Customers responded by ditching those bundles for cheaper a la carte streaming services. Now that they’ve had a taste of that flexibility, I doubt consumers will have much interest in going back to larger packages.

The Great Rebundling, then, looks more like a series of modest (and mostly optional) price-boosting tactics than an attempt to recreate the all-encompassing TV packages of yesteryear. But I’ll admit it’s not the catchiest title.

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