The CRTC’s mandate that cable companies should offer “skinny” bundles, starting at around $25 per month for a basic number of required channels, has not gone well. The companies, as it turns out, are not very interested in actually offering the bundles themselves, and are much more interested in operating in a business as usual fashion, mostly pushing the cable packages that have provided them with a fairly lucrative business for many years. But while the old way of business may have worked for years, one begins to wonder if cable companies might be shooting themselves in the foot by sticking with the old way of doing things.
People are becoming less interested in keeping cable around and paying for the service. I should know, I’m one of them, having long decided that the cost and hassle that I associated with having cable TV was not balanced by the amount of entertainment it gave me. I’m not the only person to think this, which is why the number of subscribers to cable is steadily dropping.
In some ways, I will admit this is a bad thing. At a bare minimum, it’s going to be bad news for local content, as the primary alternative to cable – online streaming services like Netflix or Shomi, for example – are going to be more focused on the national and international productions rather than what is going on in any particular region. Those services also don’t seem to be interested in licensing things like sports and live events, which does at least give cable itself an advantage.
The problem is that cable has not been very interested in changing the way they do business. The old idea, the one that they built their business on, is that you want to have as many channels as possible for the sake of always having the chance of entertainment. That worked when television channels were the only way to access content, but with on demand being possible it’s less appealing to have a large cable package with a large number of channels in it. What people want is the programs themselves, rather than the different channels associated with that programming. People have the shows they like, and want to watch them whenever they like, because that’s why streaming has been able to build an audience.
The CRTC’s skinny packages are not a solution to this problem, because they are still tied to the idea of channels. What needs to happen is that cable needs to shift focus from channels to programming itself. This would be a fairly dramatic and comprehensive change to how many different businesses are run, because it completely changes the distribution model, as well as breaking down how content itself is offered. But it’s also a change they might be forced to make, because other operations have started that shift already, and it turns out people like it. Which is not to say that cable has been unwilling to offer on demand service, it often exists, but it has often been the case that the primary focus is on the channels themselves, which people are increasingly less concerned about.
The problem for cable companies is that their entire business is built around tiers of service, the idea that if you pay more you get more premium content. With streaming services, you get all the content for the same price, which runs opposite to how most cable companies operate. However, cable companies can turn this to their advantage, because streaming services are constantly adding and losing content, and trying to one up each other with exclusive deals. To keep track of the eight million streaming services just to get one show is a frequent hassle for a lot of people, and this could be turned into an advantage for cable companies – they can turn themselves into one-stop shopping. This would take a lot of negotiation with these services, of course, and wouldn’t cost less for the consumer. But, with good software design, it could take hassle out of the system for the consumer. Good programming and service integration could take the hassle of trying to remember where on earth you’re supposed to watch your favorite show out of the program, and different service tiers would instead access different programming libraries instead of different channels themselves. There would be overlap, of course, but there is overlap as is with cable channels anyway.
Now I admit that the proposal I am putting forward is next to impossible, because you have a number of large corporations who are somewhat stubborn and unwilling to change. But instead of skinny packages and channel offerings, there is an opportunity to patch the cord that so many people have cut. That is going to be finding a way to give people the programming they want with a minimal amount of hassle. Essentially, they have to make themselves the one stop shopping for entertainment, but to do that they have to realize people are entertained in new ways.
