CBS SVoD bundle? It's Showtime
CBS, one of the four largest US public broadcasters, has
introduced a bundle of its two subscription Video on Demand (SVoD) products –
CBS All Access and Showtime, priced at either $14.99 or $18.99 (depending on
whether the subscriber chooses the ads-included or ad-free version of CBS All
Access). The bundle will offer a $2 discount overall compared to the price of taking
both services individually. This
discount is attractive for those already taking just one of the services. For
instance, for the 60% of Showtime subscribers who don’t take CBS, the new
bundle would allow them to add CBS All Access at an entry price starting at
just $3.99 per month.
CBS All Access currently has around 1.7m subscribers, of
which nearly 40% also subscribe to Showtime.
Thus, with around 700,000 subscribers taking both services, the new
bundling discount means that CBS could lose out on around $1.4m of revenue per
month. To recoup the lost revenue, CBS would need to attract roughly 100,000 new
non-CBS subscribers to the bundle.
A potential addressable market is DirecTV Now and Sling TV
subscribers; These services failed to secure carriage deals with CBS, meaning
that CBS’s OTT services are the only way for these subscribers to live-stream
CBS channels.
Ampere's research into catalogue compositions of these services suggests that Showtime had more than 2,000
hours of content in March 2017, while CBS All Access had close to 9,000
hours, giving a bundled subscriber access to around 11,000 hours of content.
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