When the recent standoff between Disney and the cable giant Charter left him among nearly 15 million cable subscribers without ESPN and many other channels, contsumers took matters into their own hands.
Nearly 500,000 downloaded FuboTV, a streaming service that offers channels including ESPN, according to Sensor Tower, an analytics firm.
As cord cutting accelerates across the country, with millions of Americans dropping their traditional cable-TV packages each year, it threatens to upend the pay-TV bundle, a linchpin of the media industry for decades. That became clear when Charter, in its war of words with Disney, declared that parts of the cable bundle were “broken.”
As part of the deal, Disney+, a streaming service that includes many of Disney’s biggest shows and movies, will now be offered to Charter’s TV customers.
“We very much can look back at this Disney-Charter deal as an opening salvo of a broader re-bundling,” MoffettNathanson, an influential research firm, said in a note on Monday.
For more than a half-century, the cable-TV bundle was one of the best businesses in the history of media. TV giants like Disney were paid twice: first by cable distributors, which shelled out billions every year to have channels like ESPN available for their subscribers, and then by advertisers, which opened their wallets to promote products alongside the hottest shows.
The bundle was also good for the cable providers, which steadily added subscribers: At the peak of traditional cable in 2012, more than 100 million Americans paid for the bundle.
That era is gone. Now, about five million people abandon cable TV every year — leaving about 75 million Americans in the traditional TV ecosystem, according to analyst estimates.
Most analysts believe that 40 million to 60 million Americans will continue to subscribe to some form of traditional cable in the years to come. The sharp falloff, however, is shifting the ground under media companies and distributors alike.
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