The New Television Bundle

Netflix. HBO. Amazon. Hulu. ESPN. Etc.

I tweeted about this earlier, but I think it warrants a bit more discussion: with Amazon signing the former Top Gear crew to do a new show for Prime streaming, it sure seems like it will now be another key content destination. For many, it will be placed alongside Netflix and HBO Now as must-haves. This is increasingly the new order of television.

To some, this is extremely exciting. To others, it’s beyond frustrating. After all, wasn’t the great unbundling of television supposed to be not only liberating, but significantly cheaper? This new bundle, when you add in a few more “à la carte” options, sure seems like it will cost more money than cable television ever did.

Here’s the thing: the money argument was a red herring. It’s not about money. It’s about choice and experience and a logical way of doing things.

Paying a ton of money for hundreds of channels when you only watch a handful makes absolutely no sense. Well, it makes sense to those channels no one watches. But it makes no sense from a supply/demand perspective. This is a glitch that is being fixed.

The downside is that for some (but not all), it will make television content even more expensive. And yes, that sucks. But it’s also inevitable. As the cable companies move from serving television content to serving internet as their main avenue of business, we’re no longer going to be sudsidizing the more niche channels. Everything will have to stand on its own.

And many channels won’t be able to stand on their own. Again, that sucks. But that suckiness makes it no less inevitable. Over time, we’re going to be paying less and less for a cable bundle, and we’re going to be paying more and more for these stand-alone streaming channels. Netflix. HBO Now. Amazon (which is an interesting one in that it’s included with the Prime service). Maybe Hulu. And one day, ESPN.

Add on top of that several other smaller channels you may want: FX, AMC, etc. And the bills will add up.

These “channels” will undoubtedly vary in price. Probably ranging from $5 on the low end to $25 on the high end. The sports leagues, if and when they all go fully direct, will cost even more. But this is how it should be. You pay for what you actually want to watch.

I suspect a bunch of smaller channels will re-bundle themselves together — think: food + travel, as an example — for more leverage in this world. The rest will fade away. Relics of a golden age of television gone by.

And this new, app-centric model, which is already happening, will lead to a rise in a layer on top of them which aims to unify the experience. This is undoubtedly what Apple has been and continues to work on. As do others.

So, in a way, we’re seeing cable unbundle only for “new television” to be inevitably bundled together once again. But this will be the way it always should have worked. You pay for the channels you want and you pay for a service/box to organize them in a pleasant way.

At least until the demand starts rising to only pay for the shows we want…