Too many people are pining for the good ol' days of the cable TV bundle. It was awful when we had it, and we shouldn't wish for it to come back.
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I'm continually baffled when I hear people — oftentimes, smart people! — pine for the good ol' days of the TV bundle.
You have heard it, too. Maybe you say it yourself. Something like "There are too many shows on too many streamers and I just wish we could go back to the time when we paid one company and got all the TV we wanted in one thing. Like cable TV."
And now I hear some of you cheering for it, as Big Media companies announce that they're "bringing back the bundle."
Like when Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery said last week that they were going to sell Disney+, Hulu, and Max together. Or on Tuesday, when Comcast said it was going to bundle Peacock along with Netflix and Apple TV+.
These aren't the old-timey bundles you're thinking of, and I can explain why in a minute.
But more important: Unless you work at a Big TV company, you don't want the bundle to come back! It was a terrible way to pay for and watch TV, and when it was around, most of you complained about it.
For those of you who weren't around and/or don't remember: The old-timey TV bundle was a take-it-or-leave-it package, sold to you by your local cable monopoly (which you likely hated). Never watched sports? Didn't matter, you were paying for ESPN, anyway. Never watched old movies? You still paid for TCM. Not into Rupert Murdoch's politics? You paid up for Fox News, regardless.
But it was worse than that. The old-timey bundle was also a prerequisite for some things you might want, like HBO or Showtime. Your local cable monopoly would only sell you those channels once you'd already subscribed to the basic bundle. And good luck unsubscribing to any of this stuff whenever you decided you were done with it — like you can with a single click for a streamer — the cable industry was infamous for making it hard to leave.
In short, think of all the things you like about the internet-enabled on-demand economy, where you order and consume what you want, when you want, ideally with multiple companies competing for your time and money. That's the opposite of the old-timey bundle.
And now, let's talk about the new-fangled bundle, which isn't the bundle you're thinking of.
Start with this: The Big TV guys are not "bringing back the bundle" because they want to give you what they want. They're trying to solve a problem that besets almost all of them: They're losing money running their streaming services.
And they think these bundles will help them save money on marketing (or "extend their marketing reach," if you like that framing better). And, crucially, they think the bundles will make you less likely to cancel their streaming service — a huge problem for the industry — if your subscription is also tied to other streaming services.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
Yes, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts promises that the bundle he's going to sell (exclusively to Comcast customers) will "come at a vastly reduced price to anything in the market today," but we've all seen how pricing works for this stuff — you start low, and then start ratcheting up. Which is why Disney+ launched without ads for $7 a month in 2019, and why the ad-free version of that service now costs $14 a month in 2024.
But maybe what you're really pining for is a better way to find the stuff you're already paying for. Maybe what you really want is a single screen where you can see everything your subscriptions will let you watch. That sounds pretty good, right?
Alas. You're definitely not getting that anytime soon because whoever controlled that single screen would be very powerful indeed. And no one with any power in the TV business wants to give more power to someone else unless they're desperate. (That's why Netflix didn't cooperate with Apple TV's guide when it launched in 2017 and still doesn't today.)
The bad news: You may, sooner or later, get closer to the actual bundle you think you're asking for, as smaller companies get swallowed by bigger ones.
Because when companies consolidate, they … consolidate. They're going to find ways to cut costs wherever they can, and that most certainly includes programming. (For a refresher, consult the recent history of Warner Bros. Discovery, which fused the company that used to be called Time Warner with the Discovery networks and has been shedding content ever since.)
And even without that consolidation, the TV guys are cutting back on new programming, after a decade-long "peak TV" boom while they spent wildly — in order to get you to subscribe to their channels. So the too-much-stuff-to-watch problem is going to be less of a problem, no matter what. Careful what you wish for.
