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> “But wait,” says Mr Manager, “you already subscribe to five publications, so you’ve proved you have a propensity to subscribe! You’re exactly my target market

> “But wait,” says Mr Manager, “you already subscribe to five publications, so you’ve proved you have a propensity to subscribe! You’re exactly my target market!” Wrong. It’s exactly because I’ve done some subscribing that I’m just not gonna do any more. Exactly. Same thing is happening with cable unbundling. Few people want to subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, ESPN+, Disney+, Peacock, and YouTube TV/Sling/Fubo/Philo/whoever to get all the content they're interested in.

Wistar 6y ago
Starting about a year ago I began to see ever more articles in entertainment media about subscription fatigue and the coming "great re-bundling," especially in streaming services.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  Well, I hope so. My reaction to choice fatigue is to say "forget it". I'll do something else instead.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
I for one would be happy to subscribe to 20+ distinct apps for TV & sports, if only it meant I could truly cancel cable and only consume internet service from the cable company. But of course many apps require over the top extra cable-based subscriptions to channels to access content. So it’s not unbundling, it’s just regular cable bundling plus a ton of extra apps tacked on, the worst of both worlds.
kbenson 6y ago
This all really started with a-la carte subscriptions, which were a good thing, even if it only partially solved the problem and was implemented without much granularity by the cable providers (there used to be so many channels that most people just never cared about). Then with the internet, there started to be less need for a provider to bundle everything, so services started popping up everywhere. Really, this is one of those areas that it would be wonderful if there was some standard by which content providers could expose their content and the metadata for it, and if you had an account with access it would be added to some aggregator for you. Sort of like what you get with Apple and Roku, with search ability through apps/channels, but in a more normalized fashion. Being able to add a discovery URL and access credentials and have a system automatically add content would be wonderful as a consumer, but the incentive just isn't there with the providers because there's always some big exclusive access deal, or a deal across multiple providers, so I'm inefficiently paying for the same movie on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu. I want a world where I can add Netflix and Amazon Prime credentials to Hulu, and access all the content through Hulu, or Hulu and Amazon Prime credentials and watch everything in Netflix, or just add them all to Roku and have it add all the content to an interface there for me to use. Amazon is actually getting closest to this in functionality, if not in spirit, by allowing you to subscribe to lots of other services through it and they show up there. Of course, you have to pay Amazon for them, and you are stuck using Amazon to view them, so it's not really equivalent at all.
- bbarn 6y ago
  Why own the water when you can own the pipes?
bigiain 6y ago
And I see it amongst my friends, who're gradually all moving to "pay for a subscription to something, to salve the 'I'm not a pirate!' conscience, and go back to BitTorrent and shared/private Emby server networks for anything you want to watch that's not on the service you're paying for".
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  In 2003 Valve determined that piracy, then rampant in PC gaming, was a service problem. They built Steam to provide a better service than piracy. Years later, after Steam has all but eliminated PC game piracy and helped create a thriving market even for the niche-est of genres, their competitors complain about their de-facto monopoly. There's a lesson in here somewhere.
  - CivBase 6y ago
    On that note, is there anything like Steam for movies and TV shows? I would love a platform where I could make a one-time payment for perpetual access to a movie or season of a show at a reasonable price.
    - _fat_santa 6y ago
      iTunes?
    - deanCommie 6y ago
      Amazon Prime Video was this before fbrh got into streaming original content a la Netflix
  - _fat_santa 6y ago
    It seems that both Steam and Spotify addressed this by becoming the dominant player in their space. Yes there are alternatives to Steam on PC and there are alternatives to Spotify, but those two have the vast majority of the content you are looking for. Video streaming was like that for a while. You had Netflix and it was the king in town, but then all the other services started to roll in and take their content off Netflix. I find it to be this wired tug of war between buisneses and consumers. On the one hand as a consumer you almost want a monopoly in the space as all your favorite shows or music will be on one platform (like Spotify). But we all hate monopolies so from the business side you would want healthy competition. The problem is that "healthy competition" means you now have to subscribe to 10 services instead of 1.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
I don't have much sympathy for this argument. If you're a very heavy consumer of the content, it makes good sense that you end up paying more. It used to be that your only options were cable or satellite packages that included lots of content you didn't want to pay for. People complained, and wished they could only pay for the content they watched. Now we have multiple competing Internet streaming subscription services, and people are complaining it isn't all bundled together. If you only watch a few shows, you can buy them a la carte from Google/Amazon/iTunes/etc. What really matters is pricepoint. A couple of subscriptions still runs far cheaper than a cable package. People will keep complaining until they can get every show there is for a minimal fee, but I don't see why we should expect that to be a realistic possibility.
- etripe 6y ago
  With all due respect, your post boils down to "we should be glad it isn't as bad as it used to be". That doesn't at all imply that the current state is desirable. It's more about access and convenience than entitlement. Even on Google/Amazon/iTunes, you simply can't access all content. Depending on where you are globally, it might not even be possible to gain access if you subscribe to every available streaming service. It's not like there's a common infrastructure where all content is published, with streaming services as a wrapper on top. And as Gabe Newell said, "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting anti-piracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates." The reality is there are a lot of exclusive, regional licensing schemes that preclude the content from being accessible anywhere for a fee. The media business has been and continues to be distributor centric instead of consumer focused, which is costing them potential revenue while they cling to an outdated business model. This business model likes to pretend the bundle is the product, but makes licensing deals on a per-show or per-franchise basis. The license holder gets to choose whether I'm fed the "one episode a week" bullshit or whether I can watch episodes at my own leisure, whether to limit streaming to a limited time period or a limited subset of a series' seasons, to postpone my local launch date by an arbitrary delay, and so on. The streaming service middlemen get to decide how much of my time to waste by obscuring quality ratings, limiting discoverability, not listing availability dates, not allow viewing of shows because subtitles aren't yet available, and so on. We have the networking and storage infrastructure to have any content available anywhere at the same time. We have the payment infrastructure to allow target audiences to access your content and pay a variable price based on what they watch. We know how to make rich user interfaces where users can indicate their viewing preference. The only conclusion I'm left with is media companies want to compete on status instead of merit. I really wish we didn't live in a time of rent-seeking, "engagement"-driven, anti-consumer walled gardens of crap.
dmurray 6y ago
It's just not true though. You could use the same argument after he'd already subscribed to four publications: should the Vancouver Sun not have bothered trying to get him to subscribe because he's already done some subscribing and is obviously "not gonna do any more"? Of course not. He really was their target market. And I'd be willing to bet within a year he'll have subscribed to content from another publisher, possibly at the expense of one of the existing ones.
- debaserab2 6y ago
  You don't think there's any kind of limit that most people will reach? I know I have the same cable unbundling problem and have mentally decided that the maximum amount of subscriptions I will have is 4. If I want to subscribe to a new one, I find the one I'm using the least and unsubscribe from it first before adding another.
  - dmurray 6y ago
    I think for most people there probably is not a hard limit. Perhaps for some people, and some N, it becomes harder to add the (N+1)th service over the Nth. I'm certain that averaged over all readers, the reader who subscribes to four paid news sources already is a better sales prospect than the one who doesn't subscribe to any.
stronglikedan 6y ago
> Few people want to subscribe to ... whoever to get all the content they're interested in. I don't need to watch anything right away, so I keep track of what I want to watch, and rotate my subscriptions monthly to binge it. Not ideal, but I'm kind of only paying for what I want to watch, instead of a running fee for multiple services.
munificent 6y ago
When Disney+ was announced, I joked to my friends that I was going to do a business startup where you buy one subscription and you get Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Disney+, etc. I'd call it "cable.com". Everything old is new again.

Wistar 6y ago

Starting about a year ago I began to see ever more articles in entertainment media about subscription fatigue and the coming "great re-bundling," especially in streaming services.

tuatoru 6y ago
Well, I hope so. My reaction to choice fatigue is to say "forget it". I'll do something else instead.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

I for one would be happy to subscribe to 20+ distinct apps for TV & sports, if only it meant I could truly cancel cable and only consume internet service from the cable company. But of course many apps require over the top extra cable-based subscriptions to channels to access content. So it’s not unbundling, it’s just regular cable bundling plus a ton of extra apps tacked on, the worst of both worlds.

kbenson 6y ago

This all really started with a-la carte subscriptions, which were a good thing, even if it only partially solved the problem and was implemented without much granularity by the cable providers (there used to be so many channels that most people just never cared about). Then with the internet, there started to be less need for a provider to bundle everything, so services started popping up everywhere. Really, this is one of those areas that it would be wonderful if there was some standard by which content providers could expose their content and the metadata for it, and if you had an account with access it would be added to some aggregator for you. Sort of like what you get with Apple and Roku, with search ability through apps/channels, but in a more normalized fashion. Being able to add a discovery URL and access credentials and have a system automatically add content would be wonderful as a consumer, but the incentive just isn't there with the providers because there's always some big exclusive access deal, or a deal across multiple providers, so I'm inefficiently paying for the same movie on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu. I want a world where I can add Netflix and Amazon Prime credentials to Hulu, and access all the content through Hulu, or Hulu and Amazon Prime credentials and watch everything in Netflix, or just add them all to Roku and have it add all the content to an interface there for me to use. Amazon is actually getting closest to this in functionality, if not in spirit, by allowing you to subscribe to lots of other services through it and they show up there. Of course, you have to pay Amazon for them, and you are stuck using Amazon to view them, so it's not really equivalent at all.

bbarn 6y ago
Why own the water when you can own the pipes?

bigiain 6y ago

And I see it amongst my friends, who're gradually all moving to "pay for a subscription to something, to salve the 'I'm not a pirate!' conscience, and go back to BitTorrent and shared/private Emby server networks for anything you want to watch that's not on the service you're paying for".

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
In 2003 Valve determined that piracy, then rampant in PC gaming, was a service problem. They built Steam to provide a better service than piracy. Years later, after Steam has all but eliminated PC game piracy and helped create a thriving market even for the niche-est of genres, their competitors complain about their de-facto monopoly. There's a lesson in here somewhere.
- CivBase 6y ago
  On that note, is there anything like Steam for movies and TV shows? I would love a platform where I could make a one-time payment for perpetual access to a movie or season of a show at a reasonable price.
  - _fat_santa 6y ago
    iTunes?
  - deanCommie 6y ago
    Amazon Prime Video was this before fbrh got into streaming original content a la Netflix
- _fat_santa 6y ago
  It seems that both Steam and Spotify addressed this by becoming the dominant player in their space. Yes there are alternatives to Steam on PC and there are alternatives to Spotify, but those two have the vast majority of the content you are looking for. Video streaming was like that for a while. You had Netflix and it was the king in town, but then all the other services started to roll in and take their content off Netflix. I find it to be this wired tug of war between buisneses and consumers. On the one hand as a consumer you almost want a monopoly in the space as all your favorite shows or music will be on one platform (like Spotify). But we all hate monopolies so from the business side you would want healthy competition. The problem is that "healthy competition" means you now have to subscribe to 10 services instead of 1.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

I don't have much sympathy for this argument. If you're a very heavy consumer of the content, it makes good sense that you end up paying more. It used to be that your only options were cable or satellite packages that included lots of content you didn't want to pay for. People complained, and wished they could only pay for the content they watched. Now we have multiple competing Internet streaming subscription services, and people are complaining it isn't all bundled together. If you only watch a few shows, you can buy them a la carte from Google/Amazon/iTunes/etc. What really matters is pricepoint. A couple of subscriptions still runs far cheaper than a cable package. People will keep complaining until they can get every show there is for a minimal fee, but I don't see why we should expect that to be a realistic possibility.

etripe 6y ago
With all due respect, your post boils down to "we should be glad it isn't as bad as it used to be". That doesn't at all imply that the current state is desirable. It's more about access and convenience than entitlement. Even on Google/Amazon/iTunes, you simply can't access all content. Depending on where you are globally, it might not even be possible to gain access if you subscribe to every available streaming service. It's not like there's a common infrastructure where all content is published, with streaming services as a wrapper on top. And as Gabe Newell said, "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting anti-piracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates." The reality is there are a lot of exclusive, regional licensing schemes that preclude the content from being accessible anywhere for a fee. The media business has been and continues to be distributor centric instead of consumer focused, which is costing them potential revenue while they cling to an outdated business model. This business model likes to pretend the bundle is the product, but makes licensing deals on a per-show or per-franchise basis. The license holder gets to choose whether I'm fed the "one episode a week" bullshit or whether I can watch episodes at my own leisure, whether to limit streaming to a limited time period or a limited subset of a series' seasons, to postpone my local launch date by an arbitrary delay, and so on. The streaming service middlemen get to decide how much of my time to waste by obscuring quality ratings, limiting discoverability, not listing availability dates, not allow viewing of shows because subtitles aren't yet available, and so on. We have the networking and storage infrastructure to have any content available anywhere at the same time. We have the payment infrastructure to allow target audiences to access your content and pay a variable price based on what they watch. We know how to make rich user interfaces where users can indicate their viewing preference. The only conclusion I'm left with is media companies want to compete on status instead of merit. I really wish we didn't live in a time of rent-seeking, "engagement"-driven, anti-consumer walled gardens of crap.

dmurray 6y ago

It's just not true though. You could use the same argument after he'd already subscribed to four publications: should the Vancouver Sun not have bothered trying to get him to subscribe because he's already done some subscribing and is obviously "not gonna do any more"? Of course not. He really was their target market. And I'd be willing to bet within a year he'll have subscribed to content from another publisher, possibly at the expense of one of the existing ones.

debaserab2 6y ago
You don't think there's any kind of limit that most people will reach? I know I have the same cable unbundling problem and have mentally decided that the maximum amount of subscriptions I will have is 4. If I want to subscribe to a new one, I find the one I'm using the least and unsubscribe from it first before adding another.
- dmurray 6y ago
  I think for most people there probably is not a hard limit. Perhaps for some people, and some N, it becomes harder to add the (N+1)th service over the Nth. I'm certain that averaged over all readers, the reader who subscribes to four paid news sources already is a better sales prospect than the one who doesn't subscribe to any.

stronglikedan 6y ago

> Few people want to subscribe to ... whoever to get all the content they're interested in. I don't need to watch anything right away, so I keep track of what I want to watch, and rotate my subscriptions monthly to binge it. Not ideal, but I'm kind of only paying for what I want to watch, instead of a running fee for multiple services.

munificent 6y ago

When Disney+ was announced, I joked to my friends that I was going to do a business startup where you buy one subscription and you get Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Disney+, etc. I'd call it "cable.com". Everything old is new again.