MUST HAVE MEDIA

The Emergence Of The Super App

Hello again War & Peaceniks! Today’s question: What do you need?

Before the dawn of time, when TV was bundled into something we used to call “Cable,” Americans paid for their TV in bulk, and watched blissfully, as part of a package of services that included phone and the internet. Then the Pay TV Bundle started to disintegrate, which in turn eroded the foundational Triple Play, giving consumers infinite choice. And it was good…

Except that it really wasn’t good. Because the business models of this New Normal sucked. And while infinite choice seemed great, at first, consumers became paralyzed by choice, and frustrated by a series of walled gardens that required endless logging in and logging out, often leading nowhere.

So, now, entertainment that promised limited choice is now a cacophonous tower of babble. This is not hyperbole, it’s reality: Recently Hub Research surveyed 3,000 media consumers about their varied media consumption habits, and found that consumers now use 982 different combinations of platforms and services. Across video, music, reading, podcasts, gaming and social, the average U.S. media consumer now uses 12.5 different services to fulfill their entertainment needs.

Modern media consumers, faced with a paradox of choices, are all now combining services from a myriad of platforms to program their own entertainment Super Apps; which I call Lifestyle or Maslow’s Bundles. When you dig into the numbers and look at the Top 100 Media combos consumers use to make their own personalized Lifestyle Bundles, patterns emerge…

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