Huh. Who could have ever seen this coming? Oh that’s right, me!
Streaming appears poised to undergo what some have called “The Great Re-Bundling,” with services merging, combining or forming alliances that will essentially reconstruct the cable “bundle” that consumers relied upon for decades.
While that makes sense for studios eager to offer “more robust and streamlined content,” as Disney CEO Bob Iger said earlier this year, subscribers have every reason to wonder “What’s in it for me?,” and if all these high-stakes corporate announcements will really benefit them.
Will it make access to at-home viewing options cheaper? More plentiful? Easier to navigate and find what you want? Less of a chore to manage in terms of juggling multiple subscriptions?
That’s the goal, but honestly, we can’t really know.
What has become increasingly obvious, though, is for all the knocks on cable, starting with the fact consumers paid for lots of channels they never watched, its one-stop-shopping approach eliminated some of the challenges springing up now.
That old system worked because the “bundle” actually created a mechanism to financially support a vast number of choices serving various tastes.
Simply put, paying for ESPN if you don’t like sports, or CNN and MSNBC if you don’t watch news, might have been irritating, but those millions of cable subscriptions spread out the revenue in a way that made dozens and dozens of channels available and affordable.
The dream of a more a la carte system, where you pay for what you watch, has turned out to elusive, primarily because there’s no way – at least yet – to adopt that where the cost doesn’t become onerous, and maybe even prohibitive, for many consumers.
Here we are, just like I said, repeating history with a different wire. It’s just a shame that we had to gut all of the TV stations in our race to nowhere, because now cable is doomed either way. The people who have been lost are likely never coming back, and those who remain are finding less and less worth sticking around for all the time. They’re also being insulted constantly, especially by the sports networks.
TSN, for example, carries All Elite Wrestling. They air Dynamite on TV every week, but if you’d like to watch Collision and Rampage you’ll need to shell out for TSN+. This in spite of the fact that you’re likely already paying TSN for five stations that are often airing the same thing simultaneously. That’s not the sort of thing that should be making anyone want to fork over more money. In fact, it often has me wanting to downgrade from five channels to zero just to make a point.
I don’t know what comes next, but if history is our guide, I hope someone is already figuring out what comes after streaming. If not, everyone responsible for ruining it like they ruined traditional television might finally be in some real trouble.