(11-12-2018 09:33 AM)quo vadis Wrote: (11-12-2018 04:01 AM)BruceMcF Wrote: But the notion of "totally unbundled" is not the utopia that it is sometimes made out to be. Totally unbundled = PPV = costs too damn much.
Well, not necessarily, it depends on what you want.
E.g., if ESPN, CNN, Bravo, and TLC were each $5 a month in a totally a la carte situation, but you could also get ESPN + CNN + Bravo + TLC in a bundle for $10 a month, yes, getting all four a la carte would be a lot more expensive than the bundle.
But, if the only channel I wanted was ESPN, then I would prefer the a la carte option of paying $5 a month for it and nothing else.
The discussion acts as if there is this one thing that is "bundled" and this other thing that is "unbundled", and they are totally different kinds of things.
Bu if it moves to a channel at a time, the "that's not
REAL cord cutting" cry can be raised for that as well ... "we are being forced by ESPN to buy ALL of the games on ESPN when we buy the ESPN Mothership Only Package!!!"
Each of those channels is
still a bundle, it's just a smaller bundle than "All of Disney properties plus all of Discovery properties plus all of Turner Broadcasting properties".
Totally unbundled would be, "today I am watching this HGTV house flippers show, and this rerun of this sitcom and this MAC basketball game, here is your payment for each of those shows, Discovery & Turner & Disney".
If the market power of the media aggregators drops, then there should be a wider variety of bundles available of a wider variety of sizes ... which would make me happy ... but there will still be a role for media aggregators to play, because there are actual economies of scope in delivering the content, and so for a lot of media, there is some bundle that can be delivered more cheaply than the same content on a pure PPV basis.