How Consumers Are Saving Money Building Their Own Streaming Bundles
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Here's your money briefing for Friday, May 31st. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. As a way to hold on to customers growing wary of rising costs, streaming companies are joining forces to offer bundled programming. But it turns out many viewers are already saving money by doing the bundling themselves.
It's like a mix and match thing. Hey, I'll give you access to this if you give me your access to that. Other times people are just logging into their best friend's TV and then never signing out. So then you suddenly have access to a streaming service that you don't have to pay for.
We'll talk to Wall Street Journal reporter Dalvin Brown after the break.
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Streaming services are teaming up to offer bundled plans, but many consumers have been building their favorite services on their own. Wall Street Journal reporter Dalvin Brown joins me.
What are streaming companies doing to retain cost-conscious viewers?
Dalvin, what are some examples of bundling being done by some streaming companies?
You have the Disney bundle, which comes with Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+. You have ESPN, Fox, and Warner Brothers working on a sports streaming platform that's coming very soon. And for years, Amazon Prime has been bundled in with some of Amazon's other services. So yeah, it's pretty widespread at this point for companies to be bundling their streaming options.
In many cases, like the sports streaming package you mentioned, some services are pairing up with competitors. Why are they doing that?
Analysts have described this to me as a pretty delicate situation where a streaming service wants to pair offerings that are complementary And the whole idea behind it is to enhance the value for viewers without cannibalizing their own offerings. The hope for these companies is that by pairing with similar companies, they're still able to tap into a segment of viewership or consumers that they otherwise couldn't. So perhaps older viewers, younger viewers, and also it's just a big retention play. You know, they want to keep you stuck with their service. And if that means, you know, working with a competition, then it looks like they're willing to do it.
They also want to tap into people's heads. There's some psychology here as well, right?
There is some psychology here. So I spoke to some psychologists who told me that once you bundle a price for something, it makes it more appealing for consumers. They say, we don't like watching the price go up when we're riding in a taxi. You don't want to pay for sushi by the individual piece. You want to get the whole lot. And so somehow by getting more of these services, it eliminates you knowing exactly how much they're worth and how much you're paying. And so suddenly you feel like you have a deal. even if you don't always have one.
Does the cost of the bundled services beat buying the services separately?
In many cases, the cost of a bundle certainly beats buying the services separately. Bundles often come with a discount that makes the combined price lower than the sum of the individual subscriptions.
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