Following are the major trends in video going into 2017.
Skinny Bundles. Last year at this time the industry talk was all about cable companies offering skinny bundles to keep customers from bailing. But this never panned out. Dish Network has a true skinny bundle option but almost nobody else has done so. Comcast entered this market last month by adding Sling TV to their X1 settop box lineup. The big companies aren’t talking and it’s hard to know if this changed due to market research about customer desire for such products or if this was due to problems with programmers assembling the right packages. But for now skinny bundles offered over cable systems seems like a dying idea.
OTT Options Exploding. DirecTV Now joined Sling TV and Sony Vue as the three providers of online skinny bundles. Hulu, Amazon and YouTube are launching similar packages in 2017 and sources at programmers report there might be as many as a half dozen other companies getting ready to join the OTT fray. Additionally there are a number of programmers directly entering the market such as the CBS package that will feature the new Star Trek: Discovery starting in January and available only online. ESPN is rumored to soon be launching an a la carte offering. This is going to turn into a crazy year for online programming and it’s impossible to believe this many entrants can succeed.
Cord Cutting Continues. But nobody knows how fast. The best I can tell from the numbers is that there is a lot more cord trimming with households paring back to less costly packages than actual cord cutting. You can find estimates of annual US cord cutters between 1 million and 4 million and only the cable companies know the right answer. But even if the number is at the bottom of the range, traditional cable companies are facing real problems. Eyeball time watching cable networks is way down and is expected to continue to drop in 2017 as people watch OTT content.
Some Networks in Trouble. It looks like ESPN will lose over 4 million customers in 2016. The same is happening to a number of other channels, but analysts track ESPN closely since it is the costliest network. Some of the more popular channels are making up for us losses by overseas sales, but sports, weather and other US-specific content has no market outside the country. By the end of 2017 I expect to hear rumors of smaller networks folding.
Continuing Rate Increases. All the big cable companies recently announced their rate hikes for 2017. Rate increases seem to be as large as recent years. But more of the rate increases are being buried in ancillary fees and equipment charges rather than as direct increases to cable packages.
No Break in Programming Cost Increases. And those rate increases are being fueled, in part, by the continued increases in the cost of programming. Many of those increases are baked into 3-5 year contracts, but even new programming programming contracts being approved in 2016 continue to include significant future cost increases.
Flood of New Content for OTT. The market is being flooded by new content at an unprecedented rate. Netflix is the king of new content and is producing most of the highly-rated alternatives to traditional cable. But there are dozens of companies now making content with the hope of grabbing a piece of the giant revenues earned by the most popular content.
New Bells and Whistles. Comcast is the industry leader in introducing new features for the home video product. Probably the best new one is the ability to talk to the settop box and eschew the remote. It’s hard for smaller companies to keep up with the numerous improvements.