
Don’t Look Now, but the Great Unbundling Has Spun into Reverse - JumpCrisscross
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/business/dealbook/bundling-online-services.html?ref=dealbook&_r=0&referer=
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mortenjorck
The article seems to conflate the proliferation of music streaming services
and of video streaming services. But the difference couldn't be greater:
Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Music have a majority overlap in their
catalogs. Apart from the odd exclusive, it would make little sense to
subscribe to more than one of them.

Meanwhile, video streaming services have almost no catalog overlap, and
genuinely _do_ represent the return of cable-style bundling. Even beyond
Amazon- or Netflix-produced content, the world of general film and TV content
licensing is such that it's rare for a film or show to even appear on two of
the top-tier services.

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monkmartinez
I absolutely agree and would add the article seems to miss a crucial aspect
"unbundling" which, for a lot of people, are spending less on "entertainment"
a monthly basis. Netflix and Amazon haven't spun "unbundling" into reverse. If
anything, they're contributing to the acceleration of the phenomena. I didn't
sign up for Amazon Prime for the movies or the music. The value for my money
was there just for 2 day shipping and would keep it for that reason alone,
everything else is a perk.

The article starts off with "No longer would anyone have to buy a $99-a-month
triple-play package when all they wanted was the History Channel." And ends
with, "the bundle is not a decaying symbol of legacy distribution. Rather, it
is the new network effect: a critical strategy to amplify scale in the hope of
building or deepening a moat to protect against foes everywhere."

I guess business school elites, like the author, are having a hard time
wrapping their minds around what is taking place. It is pretty simple for me;
Consumers want more choice and want it for less money on a monthly basis. They
are more realistic about how much time they can devote to watching and/or
listening to content which reflects in the winners and losers of this space.
Further, the proliferation of Android set top boxes, Fire sticks, Kodi boxes,
Chromecasts, and Rokus together with youtube and other streaming/free content
will continue to erode all of the above.

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visarga
People's interest in movies might take a backseat to interest in people-
generated videos, and with good reason.

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fian
Absolutely. Over the last year an interest in woodworking has caused me to
shift from almost 100% Streaming TV/Movies to maybe 40% Youtube and 60%
TV/Movies (Netflix type services).

Youtube recommendations occasionally put me onto a new content
creator/creation group that adds to my regular viewing. Much of this is both
educational (how-to videos) and entertaining. Finding something with the right
mix of educational impact and entertainment value is, IMHO, far rarer.

The rate of new (albeit shorter duration) content on Youtube seems to outpace
the rate of content I want to watch from the TV/Movie streaming services.

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verinus
Being interested in woodworking myself I wonder if you could recommend some
resources?

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated!

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spronkey
The craftsman:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/PaulSellersWoodwork](https://www.youtube.com/user/PaulSellersWoodwork)

The engineer:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/Matthiaswandel](https://www.youtube.com/user/Matthiaswandel)

And the madman:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/stevinmarin](https://www.youtube.com/user/stevinmarin)

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cortesoft
I think the really interesting point from this article is about why bundling
is so attractive when marginal costs are close to zero, for both the consumer
and the seller. In the digital world, almost all services have a near-zero
marginal cost, so bundling has a clear advantage.

It is also interesting when thinking about WHY people get so attached to the
idea of 'unbundling', even when it might not be in their best interest. I
think most people look at some of the large cable bundles, for example, and
think "man, I am paying for so many things I don't watch!" What they don't
realize is that even if the channels they didn't watch were removed, the cable
company wouldn't be able to charge them much less, since the marginal cost for
additional channels is near zero.

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gydfi
Nobody ever looks at Netflix and complains "I never watch most of these shows,
I shouldn't have to pay for them" because Netflix doesn't encourage people to
think in those terms.

Cable companies caused the demand for de-bundling via a partial de-bundling.
If you could get all channels for $50 then nobody would complain. But if they
force you to buy half the channels for $25 and half the channels for $25,
people start to wonder why they can't just get a quarter of the channels for
$12.50.

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pmalynin
No the problem is why do I have to pay for cable and still get ads every 20
minutes.

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gydfi
Well you don't have to. I've never paid for cable. I have this crazy thing
called an aerial which picks up television signals out of the goddamn vacuum.

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ghaff
Many people (including myself) cannot pickup broadcast signals out of the
vacuum (or the air) even in the general vicinity of major cities.

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gm-conspiracy
You mean the original intent of CATV?

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dpark
Cable is being unbundled in favor of on-demand. The traditional
broadcast/channel model is annoying now that many homes have high enough
bandwidth to stream what they want when they want it. Netflix is getting
business from people who think cable is overpriced but they're also getting a
lot of business from people who are sick of never finding anything on TV and
sitting through commercials when they do.

I'd probably pay Netflix $100/mo if they could deliver everything I would want
to watch in streaming format without commercials. As it is, I pay Netflix and
Hulu and Amazon and HBO. I don't pay Comcast for cable but I'm paying nearly
the same for all the services I subscribe to.

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andyfleming
It's always been about the desire for on-demand content. It's partly about
pricing, but what consumers want is freedom. They want on-demand content and
content discovery.

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nitwit005
> The magic of bundle economics allows consumers to get more for less

Sometimes, yes, but sometimes it's basically a scam that relies on consumers
having few options and low negotiating power.

Companies always want to come as close as possible to charging you without
providing anything in return. Phone companies prefer to charge you for
_potential_ minutes for month, rather than actual minutes used, as then
customers pay for the purely theoretical unused minutes. Cable companies
prefer to bundle channels because you have to pay for the ones you don't
watch.

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gpawl
It costs Comcast ~$0 whether you watch TV or not. They have no interest in how
much or what you watch, only that you want the service. (It was exactly $0
before digital, when you got all the TV in your wire whether you examined the
signal or not)

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petra
How valuable is that bundling to Amazon, against Walmart's free shipping ?

Considering it's only $10/month, and there are a lot of digital services
offered for this money, very little(maybe $2/month per user) is left to
support the e-commerce business. Is that such a big deal, in a fight against
Walmart, which itself can play that cross-subsidy game, using your grocery
bill ?

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coredog64
Grocery margins are razor thin. Walmart does better than most because of their
logistics, but they also have significantly lower prices.

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guelo
These trends could quickly change when Trump's FCC kills net neutrality and
Comcast and Time Warner start taking their pound of flesh.

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transfire
And that's why I canceled my Sling and PlayStation Vue subscriptions -- in the
end they just turned out to be crappier cable than cable. So now I just watch
more Netflix, which is the only company that seems to have the future of TV
(mostly) figured out.

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yellowapple
I'm probably going to cancel my Sling subscription as well. The Fire TV app is
buggy as all hell and doesn't even work half the time. The other apps are
rarely any better.

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shmerl
_> In music, the story is even starker than in television. At one time,
consumers used to buy a collection of songs — on vinyl, cassette and then
compact disc. It was possible to buy a single song or two in these formats,
but the internet facilitated more and more people downloading individual
tracks.

Yet, today, there is an inexorable consumer shift to all-you-can-eat bundles
of music._

Well, music often comes out as thematic albums, I don't see a problem with
that. There are good stores where you can buy albums, and individual tracks as
well if you choose. Bandcamp for instance indicated they are gradually
growing, so there is clearly a market for that.

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AznHisoka
i know this article is talking about consumer services like cable but what
does everyone think about unbundling a huge SaaS product with many (sometimes
unrelated) features into smaller products each with its own price?

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warcher
Gotta get that recurring subscription money. A la carte sales are a real hard
row to hoe in the 21st century digital world. Gonna need a bundle. ;)

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vinceguidry
I would _love_ it for content bundling services to take off. Who wants to
maintain 30+ subscriptions to content websites?

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ghaff
The problem is that, the challenges of assembling and delivering such a bundle
aside, now you have a $200 monthly bundled sub that's effectively a next-gen
cable bundle.

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smacktoward
If the alternative is 20 $10/month subscriptions, one $200/month one has
advantages: only one bill to pay, only one set of credentials to manage, a
clearer picture of how much you're actually spending every month on content.

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Obi_Juan_Kenobi
When was the last time you paid a paper bill? Or are you not using credit
cards for some reason?

I do most of my streaming through a set-top device, so I add credentials once,
and ... that's it. If I happen to watch through a browser, then there are
password managers, which seems like an appropriate solution for the few that
choose to do this.

If there were a 'manager' that streamlined all of this, that would be great,
but a 'bundler' by definition doesn't let me pick and choose services.

~~~
yellowapple
> When was the last time you paid a paper bill? Or are you not using credit
> cards for some reason?

Does it matter? Last I checked, the GP's criticisms apply to electronic bills
as well.

Credit cards make the situation significantly worse, since now you're managing
your credit card information (which expires every few years) across 20 sites
instead of 1. That's 20 sites that could fall victim to database theft. That's
20 sites that you'd have to trust to not be the thieves themselves. At the
very least, that's 20 sites where you'd have to continually update the card
numbers and expiration dates and CVVs.

One can mitigate the credit card issue by using some "trusted" payment system
like PayPal, but you're then still verifying 20 different bills each month,
checking them against your PayPal/CC/bank statements, inspecting them for
discrepancies, etc. That's made significantly easier when you only need to
worry about a single large bill.

I agree that a sort of "manager" would be nice. Perhaps some sort of
marketplace or metaservice for multimedia subscriptions, where it would
combine each service's monthly (or perhaps yearly) cost into a single bill
with a single payment method, all itemized and unified.

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valgaze
NYTimes is doing a subscription bundle partnership w/ Spotify:
[http://m.imgur.com/ayk3hoX](http://m.imgur.com/ayk3hoX)

[https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8FRL9.h...](https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8FRL9.html?campaignId=6KJUJ&gclid=CPD3uYaukdICFQ9EfgodGEMJFA)

