BIG BUNDLES vs BIG CHURN

What Big Data Tells Us About Bundling

Bon Monday War & Peaceniks! Want to get married? Don’t answer - yet.

I’m on my way to Cannes Lions for glasses of rosé, a panoply of panels, and tons of conversation about the state of Media today. During my journey, I re-drew my Map of The Media Universe - this time on a quest to find the next great Media Bundle.

Last week, Antenna released their Q2 State of Subscriptions Report focusing on Pricing and Packaging. I obsess over Antenna’s data each month because it’s based on actual usage/transactions from millions of streaming users and not a survey or panel. The data, as always, is quite telling.

Churn, the cancellation rate for streamers, is rising far faster than the cost of inflation. In Q1 2024, the SVOD industry added 55.2 millions subs but lost 50.4 million subscribers - netting just 4.8 million paying customers in the quarter, across all services.

The retention rate for Media’s premium streaming platforms has fallen 73% in just two years.

When you see Media CEOs scrambling across the earnings landscape, looking for shelter, this 👆 is the chart that’s chasing them. Which explains the recent bundling race we’ve seen in streaming this year. Luckily, this month, the Antenna data addresses how bundling actually affects churn - the bundle’s intended target.

I really cannot stress enough why this particular bundling data is so important. So much of the data fired at us through the spigot of the insight industrial complex looks and feels critical and salient. But when you dig in, their sample sizes belie their professed accuracy, making intended insights less reliable. Whereas data from actual usage tells us much more about - wait for it - what’s really happening out there in streaming world.

Antenna has partnerships with banks/credit card apps to access their streaming subscription data - anonymously and safely. This gives them millions of datapoints, not thousands of survey answers. In a country of 260-ish million adults over 18, and 100 million streaming subscribers, surveying one-two-five or even ten thousand users is not that reliable. So, if you’re like me (a huge data nerd), when you get data from such a large source, you treat it like the figurative gold that it is.

And there is a ton to unpack here. But, since bundling is the move du jour, today let’s zoom in on the emerging balance between bundling vs. churn.