Streaming TV Embraces Old Traditions: Bundling, Inflation, Advertising — And, Yes, Cord Cutting

What’s the streaming equivalent of cord cutting? Because I just sliced…

Every football season, I subscribe to a TV streaming service to get my fix (go Steelers! go Trojans!). The service called Fubo fit me perfectly, because it used to stream sports only, and I didn’t care about the vapid morass of other cable channels. (Have you seen the tragic wasteland that’s become of MTV? Dire Straits couldn’t sing their big hit today.)

Then Fubo sold out.

Enter The Bundle

Instead of sticking with a sports focus, which enabled its brand to stand out in a sea of look-alike commodity services, Fubo adopted that reviled cable practice of bundling. Now, instead of allowing us customers to pay for only what we want to watch, Fubo compels us to subscribe to a bundle of channels, most of them obscure or excruciatingly bad, such as something called “Fox News.” I grit my teeth knowing that part of my Fubo payment fuels Rupert Murdoch’s misinformation and disinformation machine. That’s worse than taxation without representation.

In addition. I’m paying for dozens of other unwanted channels, plus “regional sports” (local teams I don’t care about). I tolerated it because, a) I am a football junkie (addiction comes with sacrifices), and 2) I managed to find various discounts to keep the price reasonable.

Then, in addition to traditional bundling, Fubo decided to add traditional high prices:

That’s $100.98 combined (and, no, the Regional Sports Fee is not optional). Sorry, Fubo, that’s crossing a line.

The Pricing Red Line

As consumers, we have certain psychological price limits that marketers dare not cross. As an example, anything under $40 seems tolerable, since that’s what a typical ATM spits out when we want cash. (Twenty-dollar bills have been called “yuppie food coupons.”) At school, I refuse to assign any textbook that costs $50 or more, since that was my price limit when I was a student. And as someone who subscribes to too many telecom and media services, $100/month for any content stream crosses that barrier. That’s when this junkie calls for an intervention.

Time to bring out the scissors.

Deja View All Over Again

What baffles me: didn’t the streaming services learn anything from the massive wave of cord cutting that hit the cable industry over the past ten years? According to Cord Cutters News (yes, there’s an entire site devoted to this trend), in just the 4th quarter of 2018, AT&T, Spectrum, Comcast, Dish, and Verizon lost a combined 1.1 Million Subscribers. Multiply that by $100 per month, 12 months per year, and you can see the size of that smoking crater.

Laughably, some clueless pundits looked at cord cutting and claimed that “consumers prefer to get TV over the internet.” Ha ha, yeah right, buddy, in those days millions of us looked at our TV screens and said, “Damn, I wish I had buffering and low-rez images.” Reality check: we wanted lower prices. Business analysts tend to overcomplicate consumer motivations; in most cases, they just have to read the signs ($ signs, that is).

Fast forward to today, and streamers are now repeating cable’s mistakes. I don’t begrudge them the occasional price increase to keep pace with inflation and equipment upgrades. But making me pay for programs I don’t watch, while also running more ads (another tradition that streaming has adopted)? Well, sorry, player, that gets you kicked out of the game.

So, bye-bye, Fubo. See you next football season. Maybe.