A story appeared this week in the the music trade Digital Music News claiming that Comcast had coerced Netflix into their recently announced agreement to bundle the streaming service in with Comcast’s pay-TV offering by threatening to impose “paid prioritization” charges on Netflix for delivering its streams to Comcast broadband customers.
The story cited an anonymous source, who pointed to a paragraph in the press release announcing the deal, which reported that “Netflix-related billing will be handled directly by Comcast, giving customers one, simple monthly statement,” as evidence of Comcast’s arm-twisting. Read More »
As OTT services evolved into ever-more viable substitutes for traditional TV, pay-TV providers, I assumed, would eventually realize they were better off embracing the enemy that fighting him, lest they be displaced altogether. OTT services, I imagined, would eventually see the benefit to getting their service onto TV-input 1 in households that held onto their pay-TV service, which is to say most of them. 
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.
But while Hulu was rolling out, many traditional pay-TV providers were rolling over. According to