Nolte: Here Come the Streaming Bundles—Don’t Fall for It

“The streaming bundle of Disney+, Hulu and Max is hitting the market today at the price of $16.99 a month with advertising and $29.99 without,” reports the far-left Deadline.

That’s a savings of “up to 38% on the bundle of Hulu, Max and Disney+ compared with the stand-alone prices of the three.”

They suck you in with a low price, and then one day you realize you are the slow-boiled frog paying $100 a month for content you hardly watch.

This is precisely what happened with cable/satellite TV (CSTV), which was a cash cow for Hollywood for decades. At one point, over a hundred million households paid for bundled CSTV. The bills slowly went up and up and up, even as the hourly ads increased to insane levels—sometimes 20 minutes per hour. Then one day you wake up and realize you are paying $150 a month to watch four or five networks.

Whether it’s streaming or CSTV, bundling is affirmative action for left-wing Hollywood, a way to convince you to pay for a whole lot of content you never watch, which in turn subsidizes content openly hostile to you (CNN, MTV, Comedy Central, etc.).

At least with streaming, you have a choice. CSTV was a monopoly. You had a handful of providers who all offered you the same lousy choices of overpriced channel packages. No CSTV customer was ever allowed to pay only for the networks watched. You had to pay for dozens of channels you never watched to get the ones you did. People who fall for these streaming bundles are even more gullible.

Instead of paying $17 for three services, why not subscribe to one for a month? The following month you subscribe to another. And so on… You couldn’t do that with CSTV. You can, at least for now, with these streamers. If you insist on giving money to people who hate you and who want to sexually groom your kids, at least be smart about it.

Here’s what the future of bundled streaming looks like:

While the news of the bundle earlier this year made waves, the combined offering falls short of the bolder transformation anticipated by many industry veterans and consumers. Subscribers to the bundle, at least for now, will save money but still will need to visit different apps in order to access the programming. Years down the line, many observers believe, the experience of streaming will need to reduce a lot more of the friction that currently exists in order to unlock greater financial returns for media companies.

That reads to me like something that will become another big, expensive blob, just like the CSTV package that costs $175 per month just so you can watch Fox News.

Here’s a little secret…

If customers resist these streaming bundles, the product might improve. The reason everything is woke and gay now is because CSTV ensures Hollywood doesn’t have to please the customers. Whether or not you watch, you pay for the content anyway. If the bundle moves to streaming, you can expect more of the same. But if you resist the streaming bundle, each of these streaming outlets will have to attract and retain enough customers to stay alive. That means delivering a product people actually want to watch.

Trust me on this one…

Resist the bundle.

John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.