Has Cord Cutting Stalled? Excess Competition Has Fractured It

The NBA’s stunning new 8-year $8 billion dollar TV/ digital deal has media experts stunned and wondering what comes next? It’s a question we began asking a few years ago, We asked Rhys Dowbiggin , GTM professional, what the heck is happening to sports rights and distribution? With new players like Disney and Apple where is the market going? 

Rhys: “Apple has to be talking to the major sports leagues. This type of content is often overlooked in 'entertainment' think pieces, because they focus on scripted programming. And yet the two leading streaming players, Netflix and Amazon, have already made strides by licensing NFL games. 

ESPN+ (Disney) has been working directly with the UFC for a number of year and packaging their events on the streamer. And let's not ignore the monkey in the room: YouTube, which dominates all the streamers for eyeballs - YouTube (Google) has more live sports than any of the other streamers. 

Just for context, there is a massive amount of money in these deals: the recent NBA media rights deal is going to be 70B+ - split across a number of media partners. All the streamers took a similar GTM strategy - and they've led us back to 2001. 

The original product fit for streaming was the promise of all the content you could need was in a single place, on-demand. You only needed Netflix (in a sense) and you never had to wait or choose what to watch.  Once the market fragmented into multiple players, the fit evaporated. Half the problem that was solved by streaming was now gone: 

Watching whatever you wanted. It was now only some of what you wanted.  The streamers GTM strategy was to compete on original content to bring in the subscribers. But creating content and not consolidating content exasperated the issue.

This is similar to a business that pushes more outbound (adding more SDRs and salespeople) as a core of their GTM strategy. When the reality is that this often just pushes price increases onto end users to cover the cost of having more SDRs and salespeople. 

When CAC goes up and the spend on marketing tries to keep pace instead of being more efficient, so do the prices. For the streamers, this devalued each single service and churn went up for all of them. 

Will bundling partnerships change things? It cant hurt. But unless it drastically shrinks the numbers of players at the top to 2-3, the problem of 'watching whatever you want' won't be solved, because I'll still need Disney for my Star Wars. 

All I know is, I've kept my library card for years because I always saw this coming. And I don't plan on getting rid of it anytime soon.”

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.