Actual à la Carte
Cable television has finally unbundled. And it’s a mess…
There once was a dream. 20 years ago, we were all paying for cable. The bills kept going up while the quality of the programming kept going down (relative to what we were paying). But we had no choice, the cable companies had us.¹ If only there was a way to break the coaxial chains…
Broadband was still nascent, but the promise was there. If the connections got fast enough, surely we could stream whatever we wanted over the internet. At the very least, this would force the cable companies to offer us more choice. Eventually, we’d be able to pick and choose our favorite television programming, only paying for what we actually wanted to watch.
That never happened.
Well, it sort of did. But in a very circuitous and messy way. Services like iTunes, despite its name,² eventually offered ways to download television shows on a one-off basis. And even “subscribe” to seasons. But it was insanely expensive. In came Netflix, licensing tons of older television content to add to their own bundle. Then folks like HBO and Showtime started going direct to fans via apps. Then networks did the same. Soon, players like DirectTV were offering “skinny bundles”. Then others, like YouTube, started doing the same. Then the tech players started creating their own new television content.
Before we knew it, we had choice, but the opposite problem: an abundance of choice. And because everyone wanted a piece of this unbundled pie, many of us are now left paying more in aggregate than we ever did for cable television.
Still, it’s better, because choice is always better. But one thing it’s not: the original dream of à la carte television.
But recent maneuvers by the powers-that-be these days suggest we’re getting there. The latest move is for the streaming providers to offer simple up-sells to add-on other channels to their packages. Amazon is the best example of this. By some accounts, Amazon’s “Channels” area in Prime Video is driving upwards of half of all the subscriptions to other streaming services.
This makes sense. While we’re all out there building our own bundles of bundles, Amazon saw an opportunity to be a hub that could offer one-click custom bundling. There’s no new log in needed, no new billing information to enter, no new app to download. Just click, pay, and watch.
Unsurprisingly, now each of the streaming services seems to want in on this model. Rumor has it that this will be Apple’s next big unveil in an Apple TV strategy that’s seemingly always a day late and a dollar short. Now it’s said that Roku will be offering the same thing.³
As of now, Netflix is not dipping its toe into this up-sell model. And that’s probably worth noting as Netflix is clearly smarter than anyone else in this space. But we’ll see.
In a way, this reminds me of the cable days. Our family had our cable TV bundle, but we paid extra for HBO on top of it.⁴ These days, thanks to the great unbundling, I assume everyone is going to want to be viewed as the premium channel that HBO used to be. So the base will be something like Amazon Prime Video with its content, and the up-sells will be not only HBO and Showtime, but AMC, and FX, and ESPN, and even CBS.
The fear, of course, is that this ends up being even more expensive still than our newfangled hand-stitched bundles of bundles, which again, are often more expensive than the OG cable bundle. But we will have more choice than ever. You pick your “base” — Amazon, or iTunes,⁵ or Roku, or YouTube, or the like — and then you pick your add-on channels.
I still suspect this will lead to some of the more niche channels — think: cooking, home and garden, etc — to re-bundle themselves together to make them a more attractive package, quite literally. So true à la carte is going to be tough to fully achieve.
Not to mention that Amazon is unlikely to ever bundle Netflix and vice versa. So perhaps that’s the true opportunity for Roku or Apple. But now that Apple’s doing its own content as well…
So while the à la carte dream may be alive, and seemingly closer than ever, I fear it will remain the mirage it always has been. We can all see it, and we seem to be getting closer, but we can’t quite reach it. And we never will.
¹ Some of us were able to get satellite TV — my family did! — and while the service and price was better, it was clearly still the same product, just delivered a different way.
² Even in 2018 it’s still inexplicably called this.
³ Frankly, it’s silly that this wasn’t Roku’s model from day one. As the “Switzerland” of the space, they could have and should have owned this type of hub model.
⁴ Insert the irony of having to call the cable companies to enable it.
⁵ Snicker.
