Which Bundling Options Are Streamers Like Netflix, Prime Video Most Likely to Take Advantage Of?
Viewers can bundle various streaming subscriptions with their phone plans, credit cards or even other streamers.
Have you applied for a new credit card or signed up for a new phone plan recently? If so, you may have noticed that you can choose to bundle a streaming subscription with your new product or service. Major streamers from Apple TV+ to Prime Video use such deals to help boost their distribution to the max, and new data from Omdia is helping to show which streamers get the most new customers from various types of bundles.
Key Details:
- Over 98% of bundled Netflix customers get the streamer through pay-TV, telco, and wholesale deals.
- Prime Video and Disney are the streamers most often bundled with co-subscription services.
- Max’s high rate of pay-TV, telco, and wholesale deals could explain why the streamer has struggled to scale.
Bundled streaming services — whether they’re packaged and sold together as in the Disney Bundle, or whether they’re tacked onto a mobile phone plan or another service as an added benefit — help reduce churn since they usually require a customer to cancel all services within the bundle if they want to opt-out. Bundled services also usually come with a discount over what consumers would pay to get the products within the bundle individually.
Omdia’s numbers show which types of bundles top streaming services are most attracted to. The world’s largest streamer Netflix stands out in this regard, as 98% of its total bundled customers get their subscription alongside a pay-TV, telco, or wholesale service. Netflix attempted to grow that margin even more when it created an option for select Verizon customers to bundle an account with their phone plan and Warner Bros. Discovery’s streamer Max in December.
Unsurprisingly, Disney+ and Prime Video are the two services most likely to be purchased through co-subscription services. Every Amazon Prime subscriber gets access to Prime Video, which is the biggest reason that streamer gets 85% of its bundled customers from a co-subscription service. The data also shows that perhaps as many as 40% of Disney+ customers are acquired through the Disney Bundle as a companion to Hulu and [ESPN+$].
“Today, bundling opportunities are utilized not only for scale but to reduce churn and focus on owning data and customer relationships,” Omdia’s principal analyst Sarah Henschel said. “Effective bundling today requires a symbiotic relationship to deliver value.”
Does Data Reveal Why Max Can’t Get Bigger?
The numbers from Omdia show that Max gets the second-most bundled subscribers from pay-TV, telco, and wholesale deals behind Netflix. Approximately 75% of Max’s bundled customers are sourced from such deals, and that could help to explain why the streamer is struggling to grow its subscriber base.
In the past year, those struggles have become especially apparent. Warner Bros. Discovery had a total of 97.6 million customers between Max (then HBO Max) and discovery+ following the first quarter of 2023. However, the number fluctuated over the course of the year, and some customer redundancies were eliminated when much of discovery+’s content was shifted to Max in May 2023. In the first quarter of 2024, WBD reported having 97.7 million streaming customers, a net addition of just 100,000 viewers over the course of a calendar year.
From January to December 2023, major cable channel distributors in the United States lost more than 7 million customers. Omdia’s data shows that Max is frequently bundled as a free add-on with pay-TV bundles; for example, new DIRECTV STREAM customers can grab a subscription to Max for three months at no extra charge. Given how frequently Max customers are granted access to the service through a pay-TV plan, it’s a good bet that the loss of so many pay-TV viewers is a considerable headwind against Max’s efforts to grow its subscriber base.
The data could also explain why Max is seemingly trying so hard to replicate the cable bundle within its app. In the past year, the streamer has added live news options via the CNN Max hub, as well as live sports from TNT, TBS, and truTV via the Bleacher Report Sports add-on. Convincing cord-cutters that they can get all the content they once found on cable within Max could be a tough sell, but it’s better than simply watching them walk away from Max because they no longer get it as a free add-on with their cable plan.
If Omdia’s research broke out how many Max subscribers accessed the streamer specifically through a cable bundle, it would paint a clearer picture of how cord-cutting has hurt the streamer’s customer base. Even so, there’s a good chance that losses in cable are having a perversely negative effect on Max’s ability to grow its subscriber total.
Max
Max is a subscription video streaming service that gives access to the full HBO library, along with exclusive Max Originals. There are hubs for content from TLC, HGTV, Food Network, Discovery, TCM, Cartoon Network, Travel Channel, ID, and more. Watch hit series like “The Last of Us,” “House of the Dragon,” “Succession,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and more. Thanks to the B/R Sports add-on, users can watch NBA, MLB, NHL, March Madness, and NASCAR events.