SCREEN DREAMS
So-called disrupters come and go, and one, Spectrum TV Choice, isn’t available in Houston
Does á la carte cable really exist for cord cutters?
Last week, I reviewed T-Mobile’s new TVision streaming service, which the company touted would do to the cable TV business what its “Un-carrier” strategy did to cellular phone industry. The TL;DR onmy thoughts: “Nice try, but no.”
As I wrote, TVision not only looks like a lot of other streaming packages that mimic the cable-TV model, but it’s also a latecomer to what has become a crowded field. With the exception of a $10-a-month package called TVision Vibe, which is an excellent value, there’s not much here that separates T-Mobile’s entry from the pack.
And that’s disappointing. T-Mobile did indeed bring the wireless industry kicking and screaming into a more consumer-friendly era, but cable TV is a tougher nut to crack. That’s because, with wireless service, T-Mobile is basically selling access to a network. With TVision and its ilk, it’s selling access to content.
There’s a big difference. T-Mobile builds out and controls its network, which connects to the internet. But with TVision, it licenses access to cable channels and on-demand movies and shows and then bundles that to resell to its customers. The cost of the content is not completely within T-Mobile’s control, as is the case with all other cable companies and streaming services.
And that’s why, over time, the once-promising fauxcable offerings such as Hulu, YouTube TV, Sling and others have had to jack up their rates. For example, when YouTube TV launched in 2017, it cost $35 amonth for 40 channels. Today, it costs $65 for 85 channels.
You can argue that, per channel, YouTube TV costs less than at its birth. But you’re still paying $65 a month for more channels than you will probablywatch. According to 2018 Nielsen data, the average cable TV household has access to about 192 channels, but on average only tunes in to about 13 of them.
And the business of channel bundling can get messy. On Thursday, the CEO of Discovery said T-Mobile was violating its content agreements in the way it packaged that network’s various channels as part of the bargain $10 TVision Vibe tier. ViacomCBS and NBCUniversal also reportedly experessed concern.
In a statement, a T-Mobile spokesperson said: “We are of course complying with our content agreements, and we are absolutely open to evolving our services to make them even better for consumers.”
In the past, I’ve written that the best way to drop cable is to not focus on channels, but rather on the specific content you want to see.
When I first became a cord cutter in 2013, I totaled up howmuch it would cost to buy individual seasons of the shows we watched regularly, as well as subscribing to some of the few streaming services that existed at the time, most notably Netflix. It was significant annual savings overmy monthly cable bill.
I haven’t done the math lately, but I suspect the savings now aren’t as great. Our household probably buys seasons of three or four shows annually, at around
$30 apiece; has subscriptions to Netflix ($15 amonth), Disney+ ($7 a month), Sundance Channel ($7), HBOMax ($15). We add and drop services as needed, so a month from now this lineupmay be different.
(There’s also Amazon Prime Video, which is bundled with the Amazon Prime free-delivery service. We order enough goods from the online retail giant that the free shipping more than pays for itself each month. The video content is gravy.)
The holy grail for cord cutters is an a la carte service, in which you’d build your own collection of channels, picking and choosing as needed. To a certain extent, the app-based services like HBO Max, Showtime Now, CBS All Access, Apple TV+, etc., are a version of that. But the cost adds up very quickly, approaching a cable subscription, and adding and dropping services is manual process.
The ideal cord-cutter’s service would have a reasonable monthly price, for which you’d get to pick a fixed number of channels from a larger menu of available ones. I’d sign up for that in a heartbeat.
And if I lived in the right market, I could indeed become a customer, because this cord-cutting mecca exists. It’s offered by Spectrum, previously known as TimeWarner Cable, and it’s called
Spectrum TV Choice. For $25 amonth, Spectrum’s internetonly customers can choose 10 channels from a total of 65, as well as get access to local channels. For another $15 a month, they can get five premium channels, including Showtime, HBOMax, Starz, StarzEncore and TheMovie Channel.
It’s not perfect, as cordcutting expert Jared Newman wrote in a review last year for TechHive. There are some additional fees, DVR service requires renting an additional box, and not all channels can be streamed on all devices. Still, this is true a la carte TV, served up over the internet.
Spectrum has service in parts of Texas, including Austin, San Antonio and Dallas. It doesn’t serve Houston but it used to, as TimeWarner Cable. Comcast took the Houston market over in 2007.
Ah, what might have been.