Change comes slowly, and then all at once. And it’s coming now to the pay-TV business.
For years — even as technology-driven disruption ravaged the music, publishing, and other media industries — the traditional pay-TV bundle largely held together despite a trickling away of subscribers to cord-cutting.
A big reason it hasn’t fallen apart until now is that programmers and operators shared in interest in keeping it together, even as they regularly clashed over carriage renewals. For programmers, bundling channels into a single carriage deal brings in incremental affiliate fees and increases advertising inventory; for operators, the big bundle helps sustain high ARPU rates and long-term subscriber contracts. Neither side had an incentive to fundamentally alter the structure of the business.
Even the emergence of over-the-top “skinny” bundles proved less disruptive than many expected as programmers successfully pushed OTT providers to fatten up their skinny offerings and raise prices to levels nearly comparable to traditional pay-TV subscriptions.
But the trickle of cord-cutting has now become a flood. And as the water rises programmers and operators have begun to turn on each other in earnest.
DirecTV-parent AT&T warned in an SEC filing this week that it lost 390,000 subscribers from its satellite and U-verse fiber-optic TV services in the the third quarter — far more than even the most bearish analysts had expected. While the telco made up some of that ground with the additional of 300,000 subscribers to its DirecTV Now OTT service, that still represents a trading-down in ARPU and exposed a growing rift between programmers and operators over the future of the business.
Viacom this week which is locked in a carriage-renewal standoff with Charter Communications, accused the No. 2 cable operator of trying to prevent Viacom from making deals with over-the-top distributors that compete with Charter.
“Among the issues we face is Charter’s attempt to inhibit the creation of smaller, more innovative and less expensive packages of the networks customers want, by penalizing Viacom if it participates in new skinny bundles or OTT streaming platforms,” CEO Bob Bakish said in a memo to employees obtained by Bloomberg News.
Meanwhile, the American Cable Association, which represents small operators, is accusing Comcast of trying to prevent ACA members from creating their own, sports-free skinny bundles that exclude regional sports networks such as those owned by Comcast in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and other markets.
“Those salad days of fat bundles, automatic carriage renewals and customary affiliate steps ups are long gone,” Citigroup Inc. analyst Jason Bazinet wrote in a note this week. “Today, every media and cable firm is jockeying for self-preservation.”
That’s just what disruption looks like.
from $1.8 trillion in 2016 to $2.2 trillion in 2021, representing a compound annual growth rate of 4.2 percent– a ratcheting down from the 4.4 percent CAGR it forecast last year.
But while Hulu was rolling out, many traditional pay-TV providers were rolling over. According to 
Although the 5X increase in price is impressive — and was probably 
As with those other services, however, the lineup of channels in YouTube’s bundle is a bit of a hit and miss affair at this point. Subscribers will get all the major broadcast networks, along with ESPN, USA, Bravo, Fox News and MSNBC, but no CNN, Turner or TBS, and no Viacom-owned networks.
The question is, why bother? Neither AOL nor Yahoo is exactly dominant in its market today. In Yahoo’s case, it isn’t even clear what that market is. Even in 
Under the deal with the FCC, the merged company will be prohibited from imposing usage-based pricing or data caps on its 19.4 million broadband subscribers, a tactic many cable internet providers have turned to lately to discourage video cord-cutting by indirectly raising the cost of using OTT services like Netflix.
not networked to support much beyond overlaying some pre-baked interactive elements. Even today, when second-screen use while watching TV is a mainstream behavior, most of that activity involves something other than the content on the TV screen, or happens on unrelated social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook that are opaque to the broadcaster until after the fact. Dedicated second-screen apps allow for greater dialog between broadcaster and viewer but don’t really capture the broader conversation around the content.
The average number watched during a single binge, fact, is an astonishing five episodes, which in the case of a drama series could easily eat up four or five hours. Millennials in the survey average six episodes per sitting.
The announcement itself was no big surprise. AT&T obviously didn’t spend $48 billion to acquire DirecTV just to be in the satellite TV business — a business with little if any organic growth left in it — and extending DirecTV’s business onto broadband and wireless platforms is an obvious strategy. What is a bit surprising is the timing of the announcement.
our industry, a partnership will bring significant benefit to Paramount and Viacom, both strategically and financially, provide new opportunities for Paramount’s employees and talent, and enhance long-term value for all Viacom shareholders.
Wall Street, however, had a different view. Analysts were 
intentions for TV, and instead think that Internet TV is a fundamentally better entertainment experience that will gain share for many years. The challenge for traditional media companies, most of whom see the future pretty clearly, is to use the revenue from Netflix and other SVOD services to fund both great content and their own evolution into Internet TV networks. Seeso, BBC iPlayer, Hulu, CanalPlay, HBO Now, and CBS All Access are the beginnings of these efforts.
Conviva, Ooyala, Nagra and Adobe are increasingly focusing on building tools designed to help media companies make sure direct-to-consumer streaming becomes additive to their current business rather than cannibalistic,by better monetizing OTT viewing and viewers.