The Bloated Bundle: Today's vMVPDs Are Anything But Skinny

你最近有看过瘦包吗? 他们没那么瘦. 这些人需要节食了.

Now that we’ve been living with virtual multichannel video programming distributors—or vMVPDs, 或者是短时间内的瘦骨嶙峋, I think it’s time to check in and see how they’re doing.

A little refresher: In the years before streaming took off in a mainstream way, we dreamed about what the perfect skinny bundle would look like. Some of us hated pay TV, while others hated pay TV bills. 我们想，流媒体可以拯救我们. Some savvy operator would create what we all wanted—15 top channels for $35 per month—and we’d make that operator rich while saying sayonara to pay TV (and saving perhaps $100 per month).

好吧，已经好几年了. 付费电视已经消亡了吗? 不，差远了. 我们也没省下一分钱.

One reason is that skinny bundles haven’t lived up to expectations, so few households are signing on. People are afraid to cut the cord and want to know that they’ll still get their local channels. They’re afraid that if they switch, their entire TV experience will change. None of the skinny bundle providers do a good job of letting people know what local channels they’ll get in their area. It’s there on the website somewhere, but people have to dig for it. For households used to the one-stop shopping simplicity of pay TV, that’s too much to ask.

The other reason skinny bundles haven’t taken off is that they aren’t skinny, 而且它们的价格还在不断上涨. Hulu + Live TV goes for $45 per month and includes more than 65 channels. YouTube TV goes for $50 per month and offers more than 70 channels. AT&现在看电视 (即DirecTV现在), which started out with a confusing three-tier plan, 现在有一个令人困惑的双层计划. One offers more than 45 channels for $50 per month; the other, 超过60个频道，每月70美元.

没有人要求这样.

These services frequently raise their prices. When OTT services approach pay TV pricing, as some do already (I’m looking at you, AT&现在看电视), households have less reason to switch.

然后是频道选择. We all know the basic 15 channels we want, and none of them are 免费的form, MyTV, or FXM. Providers seem to think they need to offer several channels for everyone in the family, 这意味着多种运动, 孩子们, 新闻, 利基兴趣渠道. Please, leave these also-rans to add-on packs and let us create our own bundles.

For another take on this, I spoke to Seth Van Sickel, VP of operations with Sling TV. There’s a little bloat at Sling as well, but it’s done better than most at holding down costs. Its two base packages (Orange and Blue) go for $25 per month each or $40 together. One offers more than 30 channels; the other, more than 40.

“When you re-create the packages of traditional TV you also pay the price of traditional pay TV,范·西克尔说. “And that’s certainly not what people were looking for when we originally launched Sling, and that’s not what we believe people are looking for today.”

Sling TV自己的频道膨胀怎么办? 我正在关注像MotorTrend这样的频道, 中心——AXS电视, 和ID, which I don’t think have any place in a basic package. Van Sickel says Sling is able to offer some of these less-popular channels without increasing consumer costs, 消费者也喜欢这种额外的选择. I disagree: How would any viewer know how much a channel costs? They’ll assume that every channel is making their monthly bill a little bigger. Trim out the unpopular channels, even if they don’t cost anything, and offer a stronger base.

但不管怎样, we agree that skinny bundles need to be an alternative to pay TV, 不是数字替身.

“I think there’s danger if everyone sets out to re-create traditional TV,范·西克尔说. “If all of us re-created traditional television, then I think we’ll quickly become traditional television.”

[This article appears in the July/August 2019 issue of 流媒体杂志 as "Is It Time to Retire the Phrase ‘Skinny Bundle’?"]