A funny thing is happening in living rooms right now. People are looking at their monthly credit card bills—Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Peacock, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime—and saying: “Wait a second. This feels exactly like cable all over again.” They’re right. After over a decade of unbundling in streaming media, the New York Times has declared that the bundle is back.
Ten years ago, everyone was launching their own brand-new streaming service and offering cheap sign-up offers. It was a feeding frenzy for new subscribers. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, towards retention and consolidation. It will eventually swing back, though. That’s what pendulums tend to do.
Back in the late 1990s, Netscape founder Jim Clark dropped a line that’s been rattling around Silicon Valley boardrooms ever since: “You either make money by bundling, or unbundling.” It was a throwaway line in response to a reporter’s question about whether he was concerned about Microsoft’s rumored plan to add its own web browser to Windows (spoiler alert — they did, and they won).
Clark was describing a basic law of businesses: New entrants unbundle bloated incumbents, until customers get overwhelmed and demand simplicity. Then, someone comes along to rebundle the pieces into a single, easier experience. Music. News. Telecom. Software. It happens everywhere.
Television started with broadcast networks in cities sending signals through the air through transmitters (anyone remember bunny ears?). But if you lived out in the country, you were out of luck. Then, “community antenna television” (or CATV, the original name for cable television) started in the late 1940s. Local operators strung coaxial cables into homes, charging a small fee for the service.
By the 1980s, those cables carried not just the big networks but dozens, then hundreds, of channels. They sold them in bundles. Did you actually watch the Jewelry Channel or the Puppy Channel, or CSPAN-3? Probably not. But you paid for it anyway. That subsidy powered the rise of ESPN, CNN, and MTV—an explosion of choice and creativity. Cable’s bundling era was one of the most lucrative subscription models in history.
Then came ten years of crappy Internet video (and DVDs in the mail), then finally, real streaming. Suddenly, you didn’t need a $200 cable bill and 500 channels. You could cut the cord! This was the unbundling phase: Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO, and all of its dumb name changes, genre platforms like Shudder, Britbox, and Crunchyroll. Consumers loved it. Analysts declared the “death of the bundle.”
But pretty soon, all that choice turned into chaos. Too many passwords. Too many apps to toggle through. And the perennial question: “Wait, what app is that show on again?” What felt liberating in 2010 felt exhausting by 2020.
Today, nearly 30% of all new streaming subscriptions are purchased through an aggregator—Amazon, Apple, Roku, YouTube, or even Comcast. Why? One word: convenience. Amazon Prime Video users alone have signed up for 46 million streaming subscriptions through its “Channels” business. Apple has joined in. Roku calls it the fastest-growing part of its business. Even YouTube is turning itself into a streaming mall. The bundle is back, it just looks different — with Amazon or Apple playing the role of cable operator.
So where is this all headed? If you’re in streaming media, here are a few pricing and packaging lessons you can learn from the current state of the industry:
Unbundling creates innovation, while rebundling creates scale. New services shine in the unbundling phase, when “best of breed” dominates. But as adoption grows, customers get integration fatigue. The pendulum swings back, and bundled suites start winning again.
Bundling and unbundling are maturity signals. At early stages, new streaming services are still trying to prove product-market fit. At growth stages, smart bundling enables a land-and-expand motion, driving net revenue retention (NRR). At mature stages, the streaming companies with strong recurring revenue revisit bundling to simplify pricing and optimize their CAC payback, margin, and CLV.
Price for the portfolio, not the product. Cable providers didn’t ask, “How much is MTV worth?” They asked, “How much is this whole package worth?” Bundling shifts the buyer’s mindset from feature value to portfolio value.
Convenience is a great value proposition. Not many streaming companies can command stand-alone aggregator-pricing like Netflix. Most of us should price like a niche streaming provider like Crunchyroll or BritBox: flexible, partner-distributed. Know your place!
Bundling, unbundling, rebundling: it’s not a trend, it’s a rhythm of commerce. The cable bundle looked untouchable. Then streaming blew it apart. Now Amazon and Apple are stitching it back together again. Your job isn’t to fight the cycle; it’s to know where you are in it, and price accordingly.
As Jim Clark might put it today: you make money by bundling. You make money by unbundling. The trick is knowing when to do which.
