Bundling – Tech Narratives

Topic: Bundling

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Small Cable Firms Say Comcast Pressures Them Not to Offer Small TV Bundles (Oct 12, 2017)

The American Cable Association, a trade group which represents 750 smaller pay TV companies with around 7 million subscribers between them, says Comcast is making it very difficult for them to offer smaller pay TV bundles. In addition to being the second largest pay TV company in the US itself, Comcast owns several regional sports networks, and is allegedly attempting to force those smaller pay TV companies to carry them on the vast majority of their subscription packages, raising prices and preventing companies from offering increasingly popular “skinny bundles”. The companies have filed a formal complaint with the FCC, but only in response to a broad annual enquiry into the state of competition in the market, rather than as an accusation of broken rules. As such, it’s not clear what effect if any this complaint will have, but it’s indicative of the fact that big TV companies are increasingly attempting to fight consumer disinterest in their programming with forced bundling to stem the loss of subscribers and the associated revenues. That’s clearly not a workable solution over the long term.

Update: later in the day, Viacom executive Bob Bakish sent a memo to staff saying that Charter has been blocking attempts by the company to create its own packages and bundles in response to being dropped from some of Charter’s programming tiers. So this is not simply a one-way issue, but something which affects both sides of the coin here.

via Bloomberg