Back in the old days, we had the ultimate in unbundling: you walked up, got a ticket, and watched the movie.

In principle it wouldn't be that hard these days to do something similar with a tremendous reduction in friction. Basically pay-per-view on steroids.

My sense is that it would be tremendous failure though: how would a consumer know how to value different content? Going to a movie is comparatively a big commitment with plenty of time to decide if you think it's worth it. Channel surfing, not so much. So maybe we are doomed to some sort of bundling.

The big problem is that I don't want to pay for a month of content to watch one or two shows. And I definitely don't want to pay a month's worth of content to three dozen providers of which i may only watch a few of their programs a couple of times a month. Now if you reduced that to, say, a day pass I might bite, especially if there was no more friction than the usual channel surfing.

Mike

On 11/28/19 2:23 PM, Robert Haylock wrote:

I agree with Brian, this is not unbundling, it's just removing one layer of distribution; you no longer need the Cable company to play aggregator to the content distributors, you now buy from them direct (especially true in the case of HBO and Disney, except ESPN is not yet included). The next logical large player to enter the global** direct-to-streamer market would be NBCUniversal, so I'm sure we will soon be preparing for that one too :)

Rob

On Fri, 29 Nov 2019 at 06:47, Brian J. Murrell <brian@interlinx.bc.ca> wrote:

On Thu, 2019-11-28 at 10:50 -0800, Owen DeLong wrote:
> While I agree about the likely outcome, I will point out that
> consumers have been
> begging for unbundling for years.

This is not the "unbundling" that consumers have been begging for.
Rather I would submit that it's actually quite the opposite and much
more like the bundling that they have been railing against.

The "unbundling" that consumers have been begging for is minimally, the
ability to buy a single channel for a fair price and not have to take
14 other channels of *garbage* with it at 15x the cost one of those
channels.  I say minimally because I suspect that the really savvy
consumers would actually rather even pay (again, at a fair price) per
show or episode.

But that's not what's happening with this fragmentation.  This
fragmentation is like the cable company splitting up that "once price
for all" bundle and putting the pieces into other bundles, each at the
same cost as that original "all in one" bundle that the consumers were
originally happy with and saw as fair value.  Of course now to continue
to getting those pieces of the original bundle that they were happy
with, consumers are having to buy multiples of these new bundles and
their costs are driving up sharply accordingly.

> This fragmentation of streaming services _IS_ the direct result of
> that request.

I would submit that that is completely untrue.  Do you really think
Disney pulled out of Netflix and started their own service because
consumers wanted Disney to unbundle from Netflix?  I would suggest that
that is completely not why.  Rather, Disney was not happy to have just
a piece of the Netflix pie, and decided, as greedy as they are, that
they would sell their own pies and take the fully monthly subscription
price.

> It’s unbundled service, exactly what they have been asking for.

Again.  No.  Not at all.  Not even close.  Quite the opposite in fact.

The problem with suggesting that this is unbundling is that the cost of
Netflix didn't reduce when Disney pulled out and Disney (I would bet, I
haven't actually looked at it's cost) isn't charging the faction of the
Netflix cost that would be commensurate with their percentage of the
entire Netflix library.

So there has been no "unbundling" of any sort.  Rather it's been an
exercise of actually creating a new bundling.  And I still predict that
once the reality of this sets in with consumers, they are going to
reject it and head back to that low (zero) cost means of obtaining
their media that they used when they were unhappy with the previous
generation of bundling.

b.