Video: Will Live TV Streaming Services Hasten Cable's Demise?
As the competition intensifies for OTT live (and VOD) TV streaming services such as SlingTV and Playstation Vue, support for the broadest possible range of mobile devices and platforms becomes ever more critical as these services attempt to take a bite out of the cable and satellite TV markets, as discussed by TouchStream CEO Brenton Ough and Digital 360 Principal Mitch Singer in this excerpt from their panel at Live Streaming Summit.
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Read a complete transcript of Oh's and Rymer's remarks in this clip:
Brenton Ough: The live streaming of TV is something that's evolving fairly rapidly. I think Sling TV is probably the best example of that. That has several advantages over the old cable approach--not only the cost model, but also the convenience and the actual overall experience. It's a mix of VOD and live, so you can search for something and find, "Oh, it's live now," or "It was on yesterday." It's so much more flexible. The whole user experience is a lot better, and I think it helps blur the lines for the consumer between live and VOD.
Mitch Singer: This is one area that I think is going to accelerate the demise of cable and satellite subscribers. We're starting to see it decrease now at a rapid pace. It's only going to accelerate. Look, Apple has been rumored to have a streaming service, and Sony just launched the Vue service. Hulu just struck deals with everybody, so Hulu's now going to be offering a live TV streaming service as well. AT&T and DirecTV now will be a live streaming service, so you're going to see a lot of these skinny bundles.
I don't really think of when you're delivering content over the top as being delivered to a particular screen. It's wherever the consumer wants to watch it on whatever device they happen to be at. If any of the OTT services is missing a particular screen, I think they're going to be at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace. I think you have to cover all screens, and I think what we're going to start seeing with the skinny bundles is that they're not as going to be as skinny as we would like them to be.
When you think about cable and satellite, you know if you opt in to a cable or satellite, the channel selection across are going to be pretty much the same. It's not going to be the same with the skinny bundles. It may very well be that by the time you make up with the Netflix and a Hulu and an Amazon Prime and your skinny bundle, you're paying as much for content as you were when you were just a cable subscriber. My view on this with especially live TV streaming is it's got to be delivered to all devices, and there's going to be a lot of competition in that space.
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