What?s next for TV bundles?

Light Readingasks an important question: “Is the pay-TV model collapsing or just in need of a major upgrade?” As OTT and wireless video services supplement and replace traditional video services, cable companies are losing subscribers and must decide the best way to move forward. As Light Reading notes, the market is changing so quickly that it’s impossible to predict what that way forward looks like:

Pay-TV business is morphing into something quite different, some kind of amalgam of traditional big cable bundles, skinny bundles, à la carte services, direct-to-consumer offerings, on-demand choices, multiscreen video options and broadband video. In a few years, we may not even recognize the new creature that consumers call paid television service.

The Wall Street Journal offers ashort history of the TV bundle, from its origins in suburban Philadelphia to its recent decline. Jimmy Schaeffler of the Carmel Group argues that the “history of the pay-TV bundle is the history of a forced private subsidization imposed upon the American public by America’s largest programmers.”

But as companies like Verizon and DISH Network begin experimenting with smaller bundles, some industry experts think the market has already passed them:

Patrick Parsons, a professor at Pennsylvania State University’s College of Communications, thinks fights over the bundle will soon be akin to “debates about whether there should be headlights on buggies,” given how fast the means of media consumption is changing.

Links:

Reinventing the Pay-TV Business (Light Reading, June 8, 2015)