• Cord-cutting has led to fewer choices for everyone.
• Carriage disputes may become more common.
• It now takes multiple streaming services for many people to get all the programming they want.

It used to be easy. Pay for cable and you got access to the most popular channels.

Cord-cutting, however, has changed that. Fewer people get a traditional cable bundle, which makes it harder for people to actually get the channels they want.

That forces consumers into buying multiple streaming services which may, or may not, have everything they need.

In some cases, you may subscribe to a product because it gets the channels you want, only to lose those when the service and the content provider can’t make a deal.

In this video, TheStreet co-Editor-in-Chief Daniel Kline talks about what’s happening in the cable/streaming world and why it’s only going to get worse.

The cord-cutting trend has made it more challenging for viewers to access the channels they want.

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Why streaming has become such a mess

Transcript:

Daniel Kline: It is a real mess in the streaming world right now, because we are at an inflection point between the traditional cable bundle, a bundle you thought you didn’t want, but I paid a dime, and you got the Tennis Network, you paid a dime, I got the Cooking Channel. This was good for everybody.

Now that about half the cable universe has disappeared, there are no funds for some of these channels.

So some of the higher rate, the ESPNs of the world, they are going direct to consumer. Now here’s the problem. If you pay for ESPN on your cable bundle, you are supposed to get the full streaming ESPN.

You can watch the WWE shows, you can watch all that streaming programming, you can watch all the linear programming. The problem is ESPN has not made a deal with all the major cable companies, so you can get those channels on their streaming service.

This is a big fight, because they want money for subscribers who may not care about ESPN.

But if you care about ESPN or you wanted to watch whatever the big programming is, some college football, some wrestling, whatever, you don’t have it. So this is going to be a big fight, and it’s not just going to be ESPN going dark. It’s all the Disney channels, it’s ABC, and you’re going to see this over and over again.

This is a battle for who is going to pay for what, and because of cord-cutting, everybody asked, hey, I want to pay less, and here’s the reality. You’re going to pay more. I have like 17 different streaming services.

I watch Chelsea, the Premier League team, and I have to look up where they are, and half the time, it’s a streaming service I don’t have, and I thought I had them all. So this is going to be a challenge, and it’s going to get worse.

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