News Reporter: Act Four: If you ditch the cable bundle, what are you going to subscribe to instead?

Friday, 11 August 2017

Act Four: If you ditch the cable bundle, what are you going to subscribe to instead?

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

Ginnifer Goodwin as Judy and Jason Bateman as Nick in "Zootopia." (Walt Disney Animation)

I’ve always felt like a bit of a grouch for saying this, but it’s long seemed clear to me that if the cable bundle falls apart, or even if individuals ditch it, building a combination of services to replace it will be a cumbersome and potentially expensive process. The news this week that Disney is going to yank a lot of its content off Netflix and start a stand-along streaming service (as well as starting an ESPN streaming service) seemed to be the moment when that idea broke through to a larger audience. It was a reminder that we could end up in a situation where every network or major production company ends up siloing its own content in a different service that you have to pay for. Not only could that mean juggling many more subscription logins and fees, but also it could mean that you have to sign up for a new service every time you discover that you’re craving something that doesn’t happen to be on Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, Fandor, or any other streamer of which you’re already a member.

In these circumstances, how are you going to decide what to ditch and what to keep? I’m genuinely curious about all of this, and I would love to hear from you, not least because part of this gamble depends on audiences having extremely strong brand loyalties to major corporations. To take myself as an example, if a Disney streaming service eventually came to include all of the Star Wars and Marvel content, I would probably subscribe, but if it only included the animated movies, I might stick to buying or renting those on a case-by-case basis. I would probably subscribe to FX’s streaming service but not to Showtime’s. And whether or not I subscribed to a Warner Brother’s service would probably depend on how frequently I found myself having to buy or rent an individual movie; beyond DC, I just don’t have a strong enough association with the studio to know for sure.

Maybe this will end up accelerating a process that’s been under way for some time now, in which we’re encouraged to adopt the things we’re fans of and the brands we like as markers of identity. Maybe that effort will fail miserable, and places such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon (standard disclosure: Amazon’s Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post) will be able to negotiate more advantageous deals as the big content producers learn they aren’t up to the process of running a distribution business. I’m in the criticism not the prediction business. But as all of you start to think through what you’d do, I would love to know what you absolutely have to keep and what you’re starting to think you could live without.

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