Cable Giants Start Offering Free Streaming Subscriptions In Acknowledgement They Lost The Cord Cutting War
from the if-you-can't-beat-'em.... dept
At no point has the cable industry or its executives been particularly keyed in to the “cord cutting” threat.
As streaming video chipped away at their subscriber bases, most cable giants like Spectrum and Comcast responded by raising prices and being difficult. When confronted by growing evidence that cord cutting (defined as cutting the TV cord but keeping broadband and streaming TV) was a growing trend, most of these same executives spent years first denying cord cutting was happening, then trying to claim the only people doing so were lame man-children living in their moms’ basements.
When they finally were able to acknowledge that cord cutting was happening, they tried to insist that cord cutting was a temporary fad that would be slowing down any day now.
But with cord cutting constantly setting new records, the full weight of the disruption is undeniable for cable TV executives, who’ve started to cozy up to (or become) streaming giants in a bid to maintain relevance. For example Charter Communications (Spectrum) recently announced it would be bundling Comcast’s streaming service, Peacock, for free with some cable TV subscriptions starting next year at an as-yet-undetermined price point.
They’re also offering Disney Plus free with some of their own traditional cable TV plans. This, apparently, is supposed to boost the value of traditional cable TV:
“It’s all part of Charter’s new hybrid approach to bundles that allows it to bundle other companies’ streaming subscriptions with its cable plans and even sell them to its internet customers, too. That lets the company boost the value of its plans by pitching customers on the convenience of bundling all of their myriad streaming services into one bill.”
The problem, of course, is that people just inherently don’t want traditional cable TV. They like the ability to subscribe to a streaming service, binge watch everything of worth, then easily cancel. If you’ve suddenly bundled that into a cable TV service that’s hard to cancel, you’ve just kind of rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The other problem: the streaming services that are usually bundled for free are the ad-based versions. If you want an ad-free, minimally annoying streaming TV experience, you quite often have to pay the standard going rate for the streaming services anyway.
Charter is in the midst of a new charm offensive where it’s trying to pretend that it hasn’t been a wildly anti-competitive, anti-consumer jackass for the better part of a generation. That’s generally involved pretending that they’re lowering prices on broadband, while still simultaneously doing all of the sleazy policy stuff to erode competition and consumer choice that cultivated their bad reputation to begin with.
With cord cutting continuing to soar I suspect there’s two major avenues cable giants will pursue to maintain their relevance outside of just being “dumb pipe” broadband providers (the thing everybody wants them to be, but Wall Street won’t allow due to minimal new growth).
One, they’ll continue to look for ways to consolidate, pointlessly merging traditional cable and new media companies wherever possible. Two, I suspect they’ll increasingly work to try and make cancelling streaming services as convoluted as possible, in part by bundling them to the increasingly essential utility that is broadband or phone service via complicated discounts you’ll lose if you do anything differently.
“I’m sorry, you’ll lose access to your complimentary Hulu/Disney/Peacock streaming service (which isn’t really a discount once you factor in ads and all of our shitty hidden fees), if you cancel phone or cable service,” will become more and more commonplace. It will leave you wondering which service is tethered to which discount, something they’ll make less and less clear to users over time.
I’m not sure they’ll be successful, but I’m also not sure they won’t be. Who’ll stop them from merging and then ripping off consumers, the FCC whose every consumer protection action has just been declared broadly illegal by a corrupt Supreme Court?
With the market saturated, streaming companies are increasingly behaving just like the traditional cable giants they disrupted in order to goose quarterly revenues. The next step, in our “consolidation for consolidation’s sake” media markets is, of course, for all of the companies still involved in selling something that still looks like “TV” to simply become one monolithic entity.
That will of course drive users to either free services like YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, or piracy, at which point these companies will blame everybody but themselves for the problem.
Filed Under: broadband, cable, competition, consolidation, cord cutting, disney plus, disruption, mergers, peacock, streaming, video
Companies: charter, comcast, disney
Comments on “Cable Giants Start Offering Free Streaming Subscriptions In Acknowledgement They Lost The Cord Cutting War”
Or the too few lifeboats, which would be more germane to this particular situation.
That was the whole principle of subprime crisis. You bundle shitty products with some good looking ones and sell it as good offer.
As soon as people have realized they’ve been con, they’ll try to resell them with even more shit into the bundle.
So, one day, all bundles are just shit, and so, you’ve an economical bubble.
All the links
I am very conscious in the UK that I picked a phone contract that includes Amazon Prime and that this in turn means I don’t pay delivery charges for one of the food delivery companies. It makes sense for me at this time but may not always.
They are working to stitch everything together so if you cancel one the whole lot collapses and the sheer hassle of fixing that is enough inertia that many will just continue with what they have rather than making changes, leading to potential additional costs in the long run.
Re:
That’s basically what Prime is already lol.
Die cable
We cut the chord over a decade ago and haven’t looked back. YTTV was good in the beginning but they’ve just become cable rebranded.
We are slowly ditching most streaming as well. It was ok at first because even signing up for all of them was still cheaper than cable. With every service resorting to junk content to raise prices, it’s not worth it now.
We just buy or rent shows by the season vs signing up for a variety of services. Its cheaper in the long run. That way we watch what we want when we want with absolutely no commercials. There are a couple of exceptions sadly, but overall we are saving hundreds of dollars a year now.
Re:
I had cable from 2006-2008 because the apartment I rented had the subscription bundled with the rent. Before that, I had OTA, and after that, I had streaming services and library/video rentals.
I never really understood what people saw in cable TV: the reception might have been clearer than OTA, but otherwise it was mostly the same content, on the same unworkable (to me) viewing schedules. At least with satellite TV, there were usually shows on at times I’d want to watch them.
Re: Re:
Cable has some channels, which usually cost extra, that aren’t available over the air. Also, if you could get all the basic channels over the air, you may have been lucky. The whole reason cable TV was invented was because many people couldn’t; in mountainous areas, even installing one of those huge roof-top antennas wouldn’t work.
Cable TV was always meant to appeal to people used to broadcast television. If you’re coming from the position of someone who’s used file-sharing or a streaming service, you’re not likely to understand. You need to look at it from the point of view of someone in the 1970s and 1980s, which was when it became widespread; it’s quite obsolete now, except as a way to deliver internet service (and even in that area, progress seems to have stopped).
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We even gave up on OTA. Library movies and piracy has ‘fed’ us for years.
Re: Been a long hold out...TIVO
Absolutely LOVED my Tivo and with a cablecard ignoring the box fees was enough to deal with the rest of it.
We have FIOS and Comcrap both avail and for a while they did keep prices lowerish. But last couple years Comcrap seemed to really spike it.
Went to switch back and discovered CableCards are no longer offered for new installs on FIOS.
So the TIVO sits in a corner and we run YTTV now. Not nearly as good…but at least the DVR quality stream is…lower somehow?
Charter – offering “free” Netflix for only $200 a month as part of their cable offering.
It's also a way to boost subscriber numbers
We have Spectrum for our cable TV service and they gave us a free subscription to Disney+.
While this is a bonus for Spectrum and their customers, think about it from Disney’s perspective: they now have millions or tens of millions of new subscribers. Sure, those subscribers aren’t paying a monthly fee, but they’re on the ad-supported tier, which makes the service more attractive to advertisers. Then as more advertisers pay Disney, the better it looks to investors.