Today's OTT Marketplace: Skinny Bundles Feed Bloated Appetites

我们看的视频太多了. We’re bloated and overfed, and it’s time to go on a diet. 是瘦包的时候了.

American viewers are now getting everything they’ve ever wanted, and that’s too much of a good thing. 确定, we had massive cable packages before the online video boom started, but most of those 500 channels were home shopping, 低成本真人秀, 还有古老的重播. You needed 500 channels just to find one decent option.

现在不是这样了. We started by adding Netflix, which we keep around more and more just for the originals. Netflix’s movie lineup is nothing to cheer about, so it’s a good thing we’re hooked on the Underwood’s machinations, 利奇菲尔德监狱的演员, 以及漫威《百家乐软件》中的英雄们.

然后我们加入了亚马逊Prime会员. We picked it up for the free 2-day shipping, but the video is a nice bonus. It gives us something to watch when we’re out of Netflix originals. 如果只有 透明的 出现得更频繁了. Yeah, the movie catalog is weak, but combined with the shipping it works out. Plus, it offers offline viewing, something we’ll try one of these days.

接下来是Sling TV. At just $20 a month, it’s almost an impulse purchase. Its terrible user interface is now slightly less terrible than it used to be.

And don’t forget about the apps, which keep popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain. Now that Nielsen is able to measure set-top box viewing, the major broadcasters have a reason to make their premium shows available through apps. Suddenly there’s a lot of good on-demand content. 如果你错过了昨晚的 Quantico，你可以从应用程序中调用它. 确定, you’ll watch the same irritating commercial in every ad break (didn’t we all agree that was a bad practice?), but you can watch the show whenever you want. Those network apps require authentication, which means keeping a cable or satellite subscription. That’s okay, we didn’t really want to dump it, anyway. 我们以为我们做到了, 那时候剪脐带还很流行, but that was before we realized how long it is between seasons of 透明的.

When you total it all up, it’s more than enough to fill our short evening hours. But wait, you want a premium movie channel or two, don’t you? 确定, HBO’s movie lineup is the worst, but you’ve got to know what the Lannisters are plotting. Tack on a few online movie rentals for when you want to see a recent release that actually got decent reviews.

We now have everything we wanted, which is everything on every device. Now we see that we don’t have time to watch it. 而且，这些小账单也积少成多. Suddenly, we’re paying a fortune for our home entertainment.

This is the perfect time, then, for the skinny bundle. The cable companies have proven adept at reading the writing on the wall, and they know that if they don’t give us lower-priced bundles, 我们可能会完全停止订阅. 无论如何, they’re making so much selling us 4K-capable internet that they don’t mind a few people shaving their service.

How many people have downgraded to a skinny plan so far? 不是很多. I talked to Carl Hibbert, associate director of media and entertainment research with 英国未来咨讯发布, and learned his company surveyed viewers in December 2015 to ask if they expected to still have their same pay TV service in a year. 受访者中, 10%的人表示他们会移除包裹, but another 10 percent said they would add packages. Hibbert believes the skinny shift will plateau at around 15 percent of all pay TV customers.

这并不多. 那我们膨胀的电视消费呢? How are we going to cut out the fat and keep a lean viewing diet? 我们不是. We’re going to continue on our course and overindulge—it’s the American way.

This article appears in the April/May 2016 issue of 流媒体杂志 “瘦骨嶙峋，胃口臃肿。."