Comcast And Netflix: We’re Chill

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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 »

Set-Top Rapprochement

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Back in 2012, writing for the now-defunct GigaOm, I predicted that peace would eventually breakout between pay-TV operators and over-the-top services, a process I dubbed the set-top rapprochement (I was able to find one archived example of my musings still available online).

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. Read More »

Mirror Mirror

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Netflix’s content chief Ted Sarandos once famously quipped that his goal was for Netflix to become HBO “faster than HBO can become us.” By that he meant, for Netflix to establish itself as a high-end global TV content brand before the reigning high-end global TV content brand, HBO, could un-tether itself from the legacy pay-TV ecosystem.

So far, Netflix is winning that race. The streaming service now reaches over 100 million subscribers worldwide, more than the entire U.S. pay-TV universe, and will spend upwards of $8 billion in 2018 producing 700 original series.

What’s more, Netflix has successfully colonized HBO’s home turf in the living room. Although today you can watch Netflix on virtually any connected device nearly anywhere in the world, the company reported this week that 70 percent of its streams are delivered to a stationary TV set, either directly via smart TV app, via streaming box, or via its growing number of integrations with traditional pay-TV platforms. Read More »

Pay-TV’s Rising Sea Of Troubles

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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. Read More »

The Other Pay-TV Bundle

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Hulu’s virtual pay-TV service went live in selected cities this week, offering a basic bundle of 60 channels for $40 a month ($73 a month with enhanced DVR capability). The launch, still officially in beta, brings to six the number of live, multichannel over-the-top services now available, including DirecTV Now, Sling TV, Playstation Vue, YouTube TV, and Fubo TV. More are likely on the way.

But while Hulu was rolling out, many traditional pay-TV providers were rolling over. According to an analysis by MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett, based on publicly reported results and estimated results for privately held companies, traditional pay-TV providers collectively lost at least 762,000 video subscribers in the first quarter of 2017, more than five times their losses in the same period last year.

“For the better part of fifteen years, pundits have predicted that cord-cutting was the future. Well, the future has arrived,”  Moffett wrote in his latest quarterly overview of the industry. “It leaves the Pay TV subscriber universe shrinking at its worst ever annual rate of decline (-2.4%). And it was the worst ever accelerate in the rate of decline (60 bps).”

The news spooked investors, who sent shares of media companies tumbling. Read More »