Entertainment: The rebirth of the TV bundle
Streaming services are teaming up to survive, said Jessica Toonkel in The Wall Street Journal. Apple and Paramount are the latest to discuss “offering a combination” of their respective streaming services, Apple TV+ and Paramount+, “that would cost less than subscribing to both services separately.” Already, Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming service, Max, has bundled with Netflix as part of a deal with Verizon, while viewers can subscribe to all three Disney-owned platforms—Disney+, ESPN+, and Hulu—for a bundled discount. Joining forces is said to lower “churn,” or customer defections that occur after a viewer has finished bingewatching a specific show. At the same time, rebundled packages threaten to reintroduce the same problems streamers were originally designed to fix. Scrolling through ever-larger catalogs of shows and movies harkens back to the undesirable days of cable.
Streamers’ desperation for subscribers is creating unusual bedfellows, said Tony Maglio in IndieWire. For instance, you can now get Peacock for free if you’re a subscriber to Instacart’s flat rate premium grocery-delivery service. Walmart+ members get free access to Paramount+. They sound like odd pairings, but they offer streamers an immediate boost in subscriber numbers. “Users from the partnership programs are considered paid members, and thus part of the tally that is typically revealed as part of a public company’s quarterly earnings.” Consumers should applaud the deals, said Jamie Feldman in Kiplinger. Bundles could save people “20 to 50 percent versus picking up streaming services à la carte.” It also means fewer apps to manage and subscriptions to keep track of. “When it comes to streaming, less might be more.”
Unfortunately, we’ve seen already how this movie ends, said Shira Ovide in The Washington Post. Frustration with bundling is exactly why consumers initially started cutting the cord for streaming. It is “a slippery slope to paying for entertainment you don’t really want.” A discounted combo of Netflix and Max is only a bargain “if you watch both enough to justify” the price. The big winner in all of this is Netflix, said Matthew Belloni in Puck. Other networks are trying out every bundling option—and in the case of Warner Bros. Discovery, which is licensing 12 of its DC Comics films to Netflix, more or less giving up. “They really need the money. Everyone does.” There’s pressure on Disney CEO Bob Iger to do something similar with its Marvel and Star Wars titles. Such deals tell consumers that “if you just wait a little bit, everything will be on Netflix, so there’s really no need” to subscribe to most of the others. What started out as promise of infinite choices could “become a future of one global network and a few niche also-rans.”