DENVER — Cord cutting continues to ravage the traditional pay-TV business, but some of the same trends making it easier for people to dump cable or satellite TV are opening up space for a different sort of bundle.
Industry executives pushed that possibility at a panel at the StreamTV Show in Denver on Wednesday — “Leaders’ Roundtable Panel: The Future of Subscription Based Multichannel Video.” They suggested that the growth of FAST channels and an increasingly fractured sports-viewing landscape would make reborn bundles necessary.
“I still sometimes have no idea where to watch a game,” confessed Jake Cohen, head of business development and strategy for content at Verizon, calling that the downside of having multiple streaming deals make individual leagues more accessible to fans.
“We've got to simplify it,” agreed Shane Cannon, president of the virtual MVPD Vidgo. “There's basically app overload.”
Even the teams involved should be wary of this, he said later on — especially baseball teams that have seen their RSN deals implode.
“I don't know how they're going to make their payroll,” Cannon said. “I would not want to be a sports team owner right now.”
David Purdy, chief revenue officer for the music-streaming service Stingray, said his previous employer Rogers Communications learned a lesson when that Canadian firm, also the owner of the Toronto Blue Jays, had the team’s games on five different platforms that wound up undercutting each other: “You've got to make sure that you're not too readily available on too many platforms.”
Panel moderator Mike Grebb, vice president and lead analyst at One Touch Intelligence, noted that his research firm has counted around 1,700 FAST channels in the U.S. alone, and the panel was not convinced that was a good thing.
Mark Gathen, vice president of content distribution at Cox Communications, said FAST “adds value at no cost”— for example, single-series FAST channels can easily lock in a viewer’s attention — but added that “I think there’s too many.”
Vidgo includes about 20 FAST channels in its bundle (some as part of its 2022 deal with Cinedigm) and plans to add more, but Cannon said the overall range of FAST channels out there is due for some culling.
“There needs to be a reckoning,” he said. “There's a lot of junk content that needs to go away.”
Purdy suggested that many FAST channels would wind up as unsuccessful experiments.
“It's kind of like turtles leaving a beach,” he said. “Hopefully five will come back and lay eggs.”
With the traditional pay-TV business continuing to decay — Gathen’s optimistic spin on this was that Cox retains a contingent of “long-tenured subscribers that I like to call cable-forevers, hopefully,” — broadband providers do have an opportunity to provide customers with a simpler and maybe cheaper way to combine all these services.
“They want it to be easy. They want to have one bill. They want to see discounting aligned with a bundle,” Gathen said. “I definitely kind of see it coming back around and us playing a role there.”
Cox has begun using its Contour set-top box platform to bundle such streaming apps as HBO Max (now just Max) and Viacom’s Pluto TV but has yet to debut a cheaper IP-based TV bundle like Comcast’s Now TV.
Gathen said Cox is working to identify “what might be an interesting video product” for the company’s broadband-only customers who have never taken its traditional pay-TV product.
Cohen put in a plug for +play, the streaming storefront that Verizon launched in December and has since built out with such deals as a discounted bundle of Netflix, Paramount+ and Showtime, as one way forward.
“We really want to find customer-centric ways to package those services together,” he said. Content owners, meanwhile, don’t have to worry about Verizon having a video service that it might favor: “We can be Switzerland.”
In the bargain, +play helps Verizon acquire and retain wireless subscribers and gives it a video product to sell to Verizon 5G Home fixed-wireless customers.
Cannon touted the streaming storefront MyBundle.tv, which now enables broadband providers to offer discounted bundles of video services, as another good example. His forecast: “I think we'll see more of that."
Unsaid during the panel: These new virtual bundles, like virtual MVPD services, won’t sock viewers with equipment-rental fees that continue to pad out cable bills.