Cincinnati Bell has made good on plans to roll out a "skinny bundle" that will almost certainly irk its programming partners.
The operator's "MyTV" package is now live, offering customers the ability to acquire "the channels they want, not the ones they don't."
For $30 a month, MyTV subscribers receive 38 channels, including the major broadcast networks, and cable networks including CNN, AMC and History Channel.
In keeping with standard skinny-bundle protocol, additional networks are sold in genre-specific add-on packages, ranging in price from $6 to $25 a month.
Viacom channels like MTV, BET and Comedy Central are relegated to these add-on tiers. Notably, so is ESPN, which sued Verizon last year after the operator debuted the similarly configured CustomTV bundle. (Verizon has since reconfigured its skinny bundles and let ESPN back into the primary tier.)
In fact, those who wish to purchase ESPN must pay an additional $25 a month for the "Essentials" add-on, which also includes Fox News, TBS, TNT, TBS and Cartoon Network.
A complete breakdown of the MyTV programming tiers can be found here.
"Leading up to this, we did a lot of research and tested this a lot with current customers and prospects, and the concept itself tested very, very high," Mike Morrison, Cincinnati Bell's director of video and entertainment product development," said to the Cincinnati Business Journal.
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