My Expensive Streaming Bundle

Watching sports will be interesting for me this fall. Meaning, likely, expensive. This year's football season will be the first since I cancelled YouTube TV (my vMVPD of choice since I cancelled cable years and years ago). The reason for cancelling both wasn't so much cost as much as it was the complete and utter lack of choice. The constant YouTube TV price rises – it's now far beyond double what I started out paying for it – just served to highlight the ridiculous reality. If you don't want, say, the 100+ channels that YouTube TV (or cable) offers, you don't have an option to get fewer (and pay less), because that's not how the bundle works. But it should.

And while the new "a la carte" offerings from every content provider are clearly more unwieldy and undoubtedly untenable for all of them to exist as stand-alones, it's great to have choice! Granted, I basically choose to sign up for all them. And that's insanely expensive as a result. But still, it's the principle.

Anyway, with football kicking-off, and clearly not coincidentally, with ESPN and Fox's new streaming offerings now out there, I thought it was a good time to take stock of my own situation.

Here are the streaming services I currently pay for, and how much they cost:

• Disney+/ESPN/Hulu: $38.99/month
  • This is the ad-free new bundle
• Netflix: $24.99/month
  • This is the 4K/four device version, without ads
• HBO Max: $20.99/month
  • 4K, no ads
• Fox One: $19.99/month
  • The latest addition just in time for football
• Peacock: $16.99/month
  • No ads
• Paramount+: $12.99/month
  • No ads
• Apple TV+: $9.99/month
  • This is going up to $12.99/month shortly
• Prime Video: $8.99/month
  • I get this as a part of paying for Prime itself – more on this in a minute

Okay, I think that's all of them! I honestly may have missed one in there. No, I don't currently subscribe to Starz or AMC+ – though I have in the past! Nor do I buy NFL Redzone or MLB League Pass, etc. At least not yet.

And there are also caveats galore in the prices. Notably, as mentioned, I don't technically pay every month for Prime Video because it's included with my Amazon Prime subscription, which I'd have regardless. Likewise, I don't technically pay for Apple TV+ stand-alone because it's a part of the Apple One bundle (including things such as cloud storage) which I pay for. At least one of my credit cards has a deal where they offset the costs of services like HBO Max. And yes, you can get Fox One for cheaper if you bundle it with ESPN's new streaming service, but I don't think you can do that and get the Disney+/Hulu bundle.

With all that said, if I was just paying straight-up for these, that's 10 services (including the 3 in the Disney bundle), which cost $153.92 a month.

That's $1,847.04 a year.

Yes, that's a lot. YouTube TV, with the most recent price raise, is $82.99 a month (though it's $92.98 a month if you get the 4K option, which I had and makes it more comparable to the above options). And that's undoubtedly more than most people pay for cable, though when you add in internet service, it's probably close (though I still have to pay separately for internet service, of course).

If I take into account my caveats above, I think the amount I'm actually paying each month is probably closer to $113.95 a month. Which gets us a lot closer to the YouTube TV price – though YouTube TV has ads. If I downgraded to the ad-supported version of these services, it would be very, very close in price. But again, I have far more choice this way and get far more of the content that I actually want and less of what I don't care about (but would have to pay for with YouTube TV or cable).

Anyway, it's expensive. But it's not insane. Well, I mean, it is insane in that I have to pay for and manage ten different streaming services. But again, choice! Including the choice to "turn off" (i.e. cancel) any of the services I'm not using in any given month. I don't really do this, but I could!

Clearly the longer-term solution for this situation is more bundles. All of these services are probably not going to bundle back up into one mega bundle, but thanks to things like Amazon Prime TV 'Channels', we're getting closer to that. As such, everyone from Google to Apple is copying that strategy.¹

The problem there is Netflix. While they do occasionally cut a deal to allow their service to be bundled with other offerings, it's clearly aways a very targeted attempt to expand their audience and not a way to simplify the situation. Come to think of it, given that Netflix is basically the new cable for many people, it's sort of weird they haven't approached the other, less popular players, to bundle their services. I suppose Netflix doesn't need to at the moment, but again, that's clearly where all of this is heading, so... I bet they start doing it to some degree.

In the meantime, with the Paramount deal done, we're clearly going to see some level of streaming consolidation start happening. Maybe that's M&A or maybe it's a new partnership for a big bundle. We'll see.

For now, I'll just keep paying for my 10 different streaming services. Sorry, 11.

¹ As an aside, it's crazy that there's no YouTube TV + YouTube Premium bundle?! That's it! Another service I pay for: YouTube Premium. But the fact that it's not a part of YouTube TV or again, even a bundle option, seems absolutely wild. From a branding perspective if nothing else! Do the two services named 'YouTube' even know the other exists? It's not clear, which is so very Google.