A Short Taxonomy of Bundle Collapse
Since the streaming bundle wave began in 2024, the industry has tried many bundle shapes and almost all of them have collapsed into four recurring modes of failure. The bundle that works looks least like a bundle.
The bundle was supposed to save the business.
Sometime around the spring of 2024 — and the pivot was marked, for me, by the May 2024 announcement that Disney+, Hulu, and Max would sell as a combined package — the streaming industry collectively conceded that the Great Unbundling was over. The services that had spent a decade explaining why the cable bundle was a relic, a regressive cross-subsidy, a tax on consumers who only wanted the good parts, now stood up and said, with straight faces, that actually what the consumer really wanted was a bundle. Just a better one. A smarter one. A streaming-native one.