Cable Giants Start Offering Free Streaming Subscriptions In Acknowledgement They Lost The Cord Cutting War

At no point has the cable industry or its executives been particularly keyed in to the “cord cutting” threat.

As streaming video chipped away at their subscriber bases, most cable giants like Spectrum and Comcast responded by raising prices and being difficult. When confronted by growing evidence that cord cutting (defined as cutting the TV cord but keeping broadband and streaming TV) was a growing trend, most of these same executives spent years first denying cord cutting was happening, then trying to claim the only people doing so were lame man-children living in their moms’ basements.

When they finally were able to acknowledge that cord cutting was happening, they tried to insist that cord cutting was a temporary fad that would be slowing down any day now.

But with cord cutting constantly setting new records, the full weight of the disruption is undeniable for cable TV executives, who’ve started to cozy up to (or become) streaming giants in a bid to maintain relevance. For example Charter Communications (Spectrum) recently announced it would be bundling Comcast’s streaming service, Peacock, for free with some cable TV subscriptions starting next year at an as-yet-undetermined price point.

They’re also offering Disney Plus free with some of their own traditional cable TV plans. This, apparently, is supposed to boost the value of traditional cable TV:

“It’s all part of Charter’s new hybrid approach to bundles that allows it to bundle other companies’ streaming subscriptions with its cable plans and even sell them to its internet customers, too. That lets the company boost the value of its plans by pitching customers on the convenience of bundling all of their myriad streaming services into one bill.”

The problem, of course, is that people just inherently don’t want traditional cable TV. They like the ability to subscribe to a streaming service, binge watch everything of worth, then easily cancel. If you’ve suddenly bundled that into a cable TV service that’s hard to cancel, you’ve just kind of rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The other problem: the streaming services that are usually bundled for free are the ad-based versions. If you want an ad-free, minimally annoying streaming TV experience, you quite often have to pay the standard going rate for the streaming services anyway.

Charter is in the midst of a new charm offensive where it’s trying to pretend that it hasn’t been a wildly anti-competitive, anti-consumer jackass for the better part of a generation. That’s generally involved pretending that they’re lowering prices on broadband, while still simultaneously doing all of the sleazy policy stuff to erode competition and consumer choice that cultivated their bad reputation to begin with.

With cord cutting continuing to soar I suspect there’s two major avenues cable giants will pursue to maintain their relevance outside of just being “dumb pipe” broadband providers (the thing everybody wants them to be, but Wall Street won’t allow due to minimal new growth).

One, they’ll continue to look for ways to consolidate, pointlessly merging traditional cable and new media companies wherever possible. Two, I suspect they’ll increasingly work to try and make cancelling streaming services as convoluted as possible, in part by bundling them to the increasingly essential utility that is broadband or phone service via complicated discounts you’ll lose if you do anything differently.

“I’m sorry, you’ll lose access to your complimentary Hulu/Disney/Peacock streaming service (which isn’t really a discount once you factor in ads and all of our shitty hidden fees), if you cancel phone or cable service,” will become more and more commonplace. It will leave you wondering which service is tethered to which discount, something they’ll make less and less clear to users over time.

I’m not sure they’ll be successful, but I’m also not sure they won’t be. Who’ll stop them from merging and then ripping off consumers, the FCC whose every consumer protection action has just been declared broadly illegal by a corrupt Supreme Court?

With the market saturated, streaming companies are increasingly behaving just like the traditional cable giants they disrupted in order to goose quarterly revenues. The next step, in our “consolidation for consolidation’s sake” media markets is, of course, for all of the companies still involved in selling something that still looks like “TV” to simply become one monolithic entity.

That will of course drive users to either free services like YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, or piracy, at which point these companies will blame everybody but themselves for the problem.