Comcast and Charter’s joint venture to challenge Roku, Amazon and other streaming platforms may signal cable’s long-game strategy.
, when the company's market valuation was more than double what it is today."It might be fine to experiment with that in some countries, but it's not a big area for us."and guidance that customer losses will accelerate next quarter may be the catalyst for streaming bundles — a product that starts to resemble a smaller version of the cable bundle.
If Netflix agrees to sell a bundled product — say, purely hypothetically, with Starz, Peacock and Paramount+ — for an aggregate discount, a third-party distributor will need to sell that bundle and authenticate buyers of the bundle.But the"OG" video distributors are Comcast and Charter — the cable companies. Selling bundles of video content has always been their business.
And now they're trying to put streaming devices in the homes of millions of Americans. It's not too much of a leap to assume they'd want to sell customers a bundle of video subscriptions to go along with the installation of those boxes. "Not only will we bring these products to millions of more customers, but we'll open the door to brand-new revenue opportunities," Roberts said during Comcast's earnings conference call last week.
Rutledge added during Charter's earnings conference call that it's only a matter of time before almost all of the company's customers will get streamed video rather than cable-connected TV.This won't happen overnight. But it makes Comcast and Charter's JV play make a lot more sense. They're playing the streaming wars long game — and hoping the end result looks a lot like Cable TV 2.0.