Streaming Rebundling Starts Putting TV Back Together
After years of starts and stops, the great rebundling (h/t colleague Alan Wolk for calling this one way back in 2021) is officially upon us.
In recent weeks alone, we’ve seen DirecTV announce a bundle with ESPN’s new standalone streaming service, while promising similar integrations with HBO Max and Peacock as well. The press release around the announcement even called it the “great rebundling,” without any knowledge of the other related news coming.
That big development, of course, was the news that ESPN’s app will be bundled with fellow new streamer Fox One this fall at the all-in price of $39.99. That’s $5 more dollars per month than the ad-supported tier of the ESPN/Disney+/Hulu bundle, but also expands what audiences have access to beyond that group.
Fox One programming would provide access to Fox News, Fox’s NFL and college sports coverage, and other entertainment content that appears on FOX broadcast network. There’s a joke somewhere in here around how this renders much of the decade-long college football TV rights battle between Fox and Disney moot. But alas, that was going to be the case had Disney/Fox/WBD venture Venu ever gotten off the ground.
WBD losing NBA rights helped kill that service before it launched. The idea behind it, however, removing the headaches inherent with today’s fractured sports right environment (created by the networks themselves!) is at the center of this new ESPN/Fox One announcement.
After sports and streaming cut TV to pieces and drove increasing audience frustration throughout the 2020s, the powers that be are finally coming to their senses. Audiences just want to know what to watch, and when and where to watch it. So why not cut out the middlemen (MVPDs, vMVPDs) and just give it to them with the fewest barriers to entry?
Yes, this is just the cable TV ecosystem all over again. But it ends up that’s what people — at least 70% of them, according to Hub research — want.
Given sports’ importance to live TV tune-in and ad revenue, it’s no surprise that this rebundling will use sports to put all of the pieces back in place. Step one for all of this came in the form of internal bundles: The Disney bundle united all of that company’s owned content, just as Max did by combining HBO Max and Discovery+. Those ideas were effective, but still left blind spots for every service.
Recent months show services directly addressing those blindspots in a variety of ways.
ESPN’s additions like WWE and renewed interest in MLB rights showcase a desire to be as many things as possible to as many audiences as possible. Same with Paramount’s acquisition of UFC rights. These services are growing themselves as key figures in consumer decision trees by way of maximizing what audiences get for the cost. And once they’ve secured their place as a key piece of the TV-watching culture, they’re bundling with a competitor to become the latest “essential” bundle.
In Axios Media Trends, Sara Fischer highlights which services are bundled most (and least). As of February, Max (now HBO Max) and Starz were pretty high up at 11 apiece. Disney+ had eight and Hulu had seven.
The math has changed on several of those — notably Hulu’s being folded into Disney+ in full, and this article mentions other bundles that wouldn’t have been factored in (neither Fox One nor ESPN’s standalone app were fully fleshed out at the time it was compiled). But it’s abundantly clear that bundles are back, and getting progressively larger as they attempt to replace the irritations of “new” TV with the comforts of “old” TV.
