Who Are the Winners and Losers in Pay TV’s Unbundled Future?

The pay-TV bundle is a gigantic iceberg that’s slowly melting.

As Internet-video options proliferate, consumers will have a growing list of reasons to stop paying $90 or more per month for multichannel television. And the jockeying is now under way among programmers and distributors to prep the life rafts if viewers decide to jump en masse. A key change in the landscape: Major media companies, after years of resisting the Internet’s pull, have finally decided to step into the brave new over-the-top world, with video delivered not via satellite or cable TV, but through broadband. How quickly these moves might undercut the traditional pay-TV ecosystem is anyone’s guess. But a shift is coming.

The big concern for programmers is that they’ll get stripped out of the bundle, if Internet-delivered video spurs a migration to less-expensive packages or a la carte OTT services. That’s a growing risk as the price of pay-TV packages keeps heading north.