Welcome to the Bundle Jungle: 3 Trends That Will Shape the OTT Partnerships in 2024

Where do we stand on the Streaming Wars? After years fighting to acquire subscribers, platforms are now focused on the Profitability and Customer Retention Battlefield: but how will Netflix, Prime Video, and others keep differentiating? Content will remain the key topic, but its increasing costs remain a real threat to profitability. Pricing strategies? Yes, ad-tiers were already introduced from 2022 onwards - almost becoming an industry standard. Here is what could drag - and retain - customers: bundles. But as expensive cable bundles contributed to cord-cutting across the 2010s, what type of bundle will appear as the most valuable to the eyes of consumers? Let’s evaluate the trends that will shape the OTT Bundles in 2024. The Bundle Cycles: Has Streaming Become the New Cable TV? The current situation brings us back to old times. Cable TV Bundles became more and more expensive, which led to cord-cutting. Streaming services such as Netflix appeared as a cheaper alternative. As time went by, more OTT platforms entered the market, with each one of them striving to be different from its competitors thanks to content, which in the end became costly for players.  However, as the number of platforms increased, the audiences became fragmented. Consumers started stacking SVOD services, with the growing feeling they were paying too much while being sometimes lost over what to watch. In the end, viewers started to cut the cord on streaming, as if the latter had become the new Cable TV. If so, what can we expect from the industry on the bundle side? Telecom Operators Surfing the Ad-supported Wave: How Traditional Bundle Reinvents Itself Broadband Operators: Cablecos Fighting Churn, Fiber Players Aiming Higher As Cable operators gradually lose subscribers, bundling OTT services is a way to retain customers while focusing on their core services.Charter, who for the first time surpassed Comcast as the #1 Pay TV operator in the US, for instance, added Disney+ Basic plans for all their Spectrum TV Select subscribers. This addition was dealt in the context of the carriage dispute between the group and Disney, which resulted in Charter reportedly paying higher fees to Bob Iger’s company, for less linear TV channels but with an interesting streaming deal. The Stamford-based cableco also inked a new carriage deal with TelevisaUnivision, bringing ViX Premium ad-supported plan to their TV Select and MiPlan Latino customers.  Carriage deals currently change the face of bundles, pushing historic operators to bridge the gap between linear and streaming. In turn, streamers benefit from access to a larger base, which is even more important for an ad-supported tier that needs scale to attract advertisers. OTT platforms also take advantage of the pre-existing billing relationship with customers, which can be a...