Has Content Aggregation Made Skinny OTT Bundles Obsolete
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Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Chris Pfaff: Paul, as somebody who's been around this business a long time, what do you think of the skinny bundle? Is that a term we should just leave behind, or does that apply in your world? Because, of course, you're an unusual and unique super-aggregator, wouldn't you say?
Paul Pastor: Yes, for sure. It's kind of amazing when you sit there and you look at where the cable penetration was in 2015 and that where it is today--nearly around 71% of television households. And so it's still important. It's just less important, in terms of our overall ecosystem. And I think we've seen the rise of the Fubos, the Philos, and otherwise that are looking to address various components of that Fubo, leaning more into sports, Philo leaning more into the skinny bundle, and those services. What I think we've seen at the same time is, people have begun to supplement or trade off from cord-nevers into this other ecosystem of app-based development.
The streaming services we see in most television households in the U.S.--between Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+, they have nearly 65% global share of SVOD services. If you add in the U.S. HBO Max with Hulu, you have nearly 75% concentration on five various players. So that means a higher degree of concentration, even those 300 services.
The second thing is, we're seeing a lot more in the third and fourth choice of their service. They're doing a lot more app-hopping. So it's kind of like, "Hey, I came in for this show and now it's very easy to unsubscribe. Now, let me offend in the next show." So I think that's kind of the way of the world in terms of looking for people to manage their budgets and try and figure out efficient ways to be able to get the content they want to watch.
The reason Struum exists, and what we're trying to do, is to help those services that sit in the medium-to-long tail of the pipe and say, "Here's a great way for you to discover, here's a new front porch, and a new credit-based model. The second piece is, let's help you win the habit and discovery through the use of these recommendation engines. I can see from my own past history with Hulu that time spent on the platform will significantly increase when you have more to offer, in terms of recommendations.
And the third is it's thinking about that app-hopping experience. How do you actually make, become part of the habit? You can manage that app-hopping experience all through our service. So those are some of the goals we have to be able to win more mindshare, timeshare, economic share of the pie for those medium-to-longtail services. And I think that's going to be part of the way the ecosystem continues to develop and grow.
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