re: Playstation Vue Price Increase

quote:

---

Feel like I am getting sucked back into a cable business model.

---

You are.

I've written about this here before, and the gist of it is the current crop of streaming services suffers from the same problem as cable packages: the channel bundle. The popular (read: expensive) channels want to be bundled with a bunch of cheap channels to hide their true cost via averaging, and the cheap channels want to be bundled with the popular ones to increase their reach. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement on their end, and the customer ultimately gets screwed.

The other big problem is the TV industry is a bizarro world where more competition leads to higher prices, rather than the other way around like it should. The reason is the streaming services, like the cable companies, are at the mercy of the content owners, because the content owners are the only source of their particular product. It's not like most products where you can choose an alternative. Each channel is its own collection of art that can't be found elsewhere. It's like an auction, where more bidders (in this case streaming services) drive prices higher.



So I think this is phase 1 of the TV revolution. The bundles will keep getting bigger, and the prices will keep creeping up until people start to realize that this is just the same old cable TV delivered a slightly different way. Then we'll have to go through the whole process of cutting this new cord again to bust the bundles. Then there may be another phase where the market pries individual shows away from the content owners to bust those "bundles".

It's not going to get better permanently until we can subscribe to individual shows a la carte at reasonable prices. Until then, expect the industry to keep gravitating toward the cable bundle model.