Mar 23, 2015

Maybe It’s Not The Size of the Bundle After All

Originally published at BRaVe Ventures Medium on March 19, 2014










Oh, to be one of those 10 million Millennials who have broadband, but don’t have pay TV.
The world is at your feet these days, what with everyone trying to lure you back to the pay TV empire, waving new “slimmed down” bundles at you, cool new Apple TV slimmed down bundles being the latest salvo. (Maybe. No one at Apple seems to have actually confirmed that yet.)



Here’s a BRaVe thought, something we’ve been wondering about for a while: the underlying premise of all these slimmed down bundles is that people really, really want pay TV, they just don’t want to have to pay lots of money for all sorts of unnecessary channels they don’t watch.



But what if that’s not true?
What if the last thing that’s bugging them is too many channels? What if their main pain point is being forced to adhere to a linear schedule and sit through 8 minutes of commercials every time they watch a 30 minute show? What if all they really want is maximum a la carteness, the ability to pick and choose shows, not networks.
The news stories on Apple hinted at this, at Apple wanting to get extreme VOD rights to all the networks they’re showing, but they also seemed to indicate that it was a pipe dream, something way off on the horizon. (If indeed, it’s even true.)
Because all VOD, all the time, is where the future is headed. It means bye-bye DVRs and the ability to skip commercials. It also means fewer, better targeted commercials and because you’ve got people who actually want to watch your show watching those hyper-targeted commercials, it means you can charge more for them. It means completely reinventing the way we look at television and how people watch it.
It means a revolution, not a Band-Aid.


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