The industry is abuzz this year with talk about skinny bundles. But there is a lot of disagreement about whether skinny bundles are really going to be effective and if they will put a serious dent in the pay-TV market. Today I look at opposing views from two major players in the industry.
First are the recent statements by David Zaslav, the CEO of Discovery Communications. He says the skinny bundles we see in the US are not really ‘skinny’ and are instead just another way to package traditional programming. He says that Discovery sells programming around the world and that in almost 200 other worldwide cable markets there are true skinny bundles that cost between $8 and $12 per month. He says these bundles are popular and give people a real alternative to the big cable bundles.
By contrast all of the major bundles on the market today in the US are priced at $30 to $60 and just provide a different alternative to the cable companies. The current US bundles are expensive because they include high-cost programming like sports, movie channels and major cable networks.
Zaslav’s statements are somewhat ironic since his company is one of the major programmers that drives up the size and the cost of traditional cable TV big channel line-ups. Discovery today includes a suite of 13 channels such as the Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, Science, and a host of other Discovery channels. Many of my clients are required to carry all of these channels if they want to carry any of them, and at least eight of these channels are required to be in the lower expanded basic tier where most customers have to pay for them. It’s also interesting that most of the current on-line skinny bundles in the US are not carrying the Discovery networks.
An interesting contrast to this comes from Charlie Ergen, Chairman and CEO of Dish Networks. He is wildly enthusiastic about the current US skinny bundles, including his own Sling TV. He says the company first launched Sling TV to try to lure cord cutters back to a paid subscription. But the company found out that they were instead taking customers away from pay-TV including his own satellite customers from Dish networks.
He believes that the public perceives the current US skinny bundles as a real alternative to the traditional pay-TV bundle. Sling TV has done better in the market than original projections. At the end of the 1st quarter of 2017 the company had 1.3 million customers, about double where they sat just last June. The other similar subscription services from Hulu and YouTube are also doing quite well and together are carving off a noticeable slice of the traditional TV market.
But Ergen admits that his Sling TV is a replacement for traditional TV, not a wildly different alternative. A lot of customers like on-line services because they offer the the ability to start and stop service at will or to add or subtract additional small packages of channels to the line-up as their interests change. It’s certainly possible that much of the success of these new bundles comes from consumers who are fed up with the big cable companies.
It’s also debatable if people who move from traditional cable to Sling TV or similar services can be classified as cord cutters. They are cord cutters in that they got rid of coaxial cable feed from the cable company, but they are still subscribing to a lot of the same channels as before and which are still broadcast at set times on a line-up.
For now it looks like the current skinny bundles are meeting moderate success and are attracting a few million customers. They haven’t been around very long and I suspect that a lot of consumers have either never heard of them or haven’t given them any serious consideration. But you can save money with these packages while gaining the flexibility to connect and disconnect on-line at any time – avoiding those dreadful call to cable customer service.
I know I would love to see the skinny bundles that David Zaslav describes. I imagine that each $8 – $12 bundle contains a limited number of channels. At a small size these are probably as close as anybody can get to a la carte programming. And at the end of the day that’s what a lot of cord cutters really want.