UnifiedOnline Inc fka UOIP

[justus1]

Cable Companies royalties looks good for the future and look forward to Comcast number leaking out..


https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/15/18225269/streaming-future-cable-netflix-hulu-disney

Cable companies figured out early in the cable revolution that the natural solution to a world with a whole bunch of channels at varying price points is to bundle those channels together into a slightly more affordable bundle. Some company will probably “rediscover” this idea as we head deeper into the streaming age. And it almost doesn’t matter if what’s being bundled together is effectively a bunch of bundles, as long as it’s more cost-effective.

So next, consider this: A shocking amount of the US broadband infrastructure is still controlled by cable companies, which might be losing TV subscribers but continue to have a fairly ironclad lock on providing internet. In many parts of my city, Los Angeles, the only option when it comes to buying an internet package is to go with a local cable company like AT&T.

At least two major cable companies — AT&T and Comcast — are about to have affiliated streaming platforms (WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal, which is an investor in Vox Media, respectively). So they might not be thrilled to play ball with Netflix or Disney or [insert other entertainment company here] when creating cable bundles 2.0, given that doing so might directly enrich their competitors.

But at the same time, my guess is that most of these companies know they’re not going to wipe massive companies like Netflix or Disney from the face of the earth — to say nothing of a company like Apple, which is still waiting in the wings with its own proposed streaming service, or YouTube, which has struggled to launch its own subscription service but owns the viewership habits of the generation just entering its teens and 20s.

Which means that eventually, we’ll probably go right back to the cable bundle as the only real option for getting access to film and TV content at home. Those who really want to will still be able to assemble their own packages à la carte (presuming that the death of net neutrality doesn’t result in cable companies privileging their own streaming services to the exclusion of others, which is an entirely different ball of wax).

But most of us will pay the $200 a month for internet and streaming TV. It’ll just be easier, if horribly expensive.

Will all of this happen like I say it will? Some of my predictions might miss the mark; maybe Netflix will rise above everybody else and cement its status as a sort of Spotify of TV, with all major competitors having to navigate around its ubiquity. Maybe Disney’s deep bench of content pushes it into first place. Maybe Amazon does ... something ... and then it comes in first place? Hey, that could happen!

But I wrote a version of this article in 2016, and a surprising amount of what I predicted then has happened in the years since. And when I talk to folks in the TV industry, very few of them suggest the future I’ve laid out above is unlikely. Even people who work for the streaming networks understand that having a bunch of streaming networks, all with their own unique and in-demand programming, all asking you to pay between $10 and $20 per month, could end up being catastrophic to consumers. But there’s too much money on the line for those who might find a way to get us to that point, so today’s many, many players keep charting a collision course of their own making.

RELATED

Netflix or Hulu won’t win the streaming wars. Your cable company will.
The era of media consolidation has made it harder and harder to ignore that we are heading, inexorably, toward a period when major entertainment corporations will control the distribution and production models for their programming and will, effectively, be able to charge whatever they want for it. And in that world, the cord-cutting era will start to feel a little like a blip, when a growing movement to change an unfair game invented an entirely new one.

Correction: The original version of this article stated that UVerse and Time Warner Cable are part of the same massive corporation. They are part of different massive corporations! The article has been changed to reflect this.