Bango, the subscription technology provider that facilitates bundling for streaming companies, announced Monday a strategic agreement with Disney.

The company plans to expand its Digital Vending Machine (DVM) by adding Disney Plus to its host of partners.

Through the agreement, Disney Plus will be available in select markets to sell directly attached to mobile phone and broadband plans, as well as with other DVM partners including Netflix and Amazon Prime.

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“After just two years, Bango's DVM now has almost 100 connected partners, including Netflix, Amazon Prime and Xbox Game Pass,” said a Bango rep via email. “The Bango DVM enables mobile operators to offer Disney Plus to their customers through promotional and a la carte offers in subscription hubs where multiple subscriptions can be paid for and managed all in one place.”

According to a press release, Bango “takes care of all technical aspects” when creating and managing subscription offers for its clients.

It’s not the first time Disney has engaged in bundling, with its Hulu and Max package that launched earlier this summer. But until now the company hasn’t tried expanding its reach through this method of indirect bundling.

A representative for Bango pointed out that this “marks a significant strategic shift [for Disney], unlocking previously untapped channels, and facilitating direct relationships with telcos and other reseller partners with ease.”

“Disney Plus is already a top entertainment choice for consumers worldwide and making the service available through Bango will provide more opportunities to reach new customers and further expand its already impressive membership base,” wrote Bango’s CMO, Anil Malhotra in a press release. “As indirect subscriptions continue to grow, Bango ensures a seamless and quick solution for market-leading products and services.”

Bango currently has agreements with several large providers including Amazon, Google, Netflix, Optus, T-Mobile and Microsoft.

Netflix said in last Thursday’s Q2 letter to shareholder’s that it won’t be taking part in the increasingly common practice of bundling its service with subscription streaming competitors.

“We haven’t bundled Netflix solely with other streamers like Disney Plus or Max because Netflix already operates as a go-to destination for entertainment thanks to the breadth and variety of our slate and superior product experience,” Netflix said in the letter. 

This position jibes with data released last month by Antenna suggesting service bundling presents more of a "cannibalization risk" to Netflix vs. other streaming companies. 

Also read: Disney Bundle Cuts Hulu Churn Nearly in Half (Charts of the Day)

In the Q2 version of its  State of Subscription report, published last month, Antenna tracked the effectiveness of bundling by measuring the ratio of customers who are "curious" about seeing other streaming services, vs. "committed" customers.

Also Read: Netflix Solidly Beats Revenue Forecasts With 17% Growth in Q2, Adds More Than 8 Million Subscribers

To differentiate between potentially productive bundles and what Antenna calls “cannibalistic” bundle opportunities, it’s important to determine whether both services have a large enough pool of curious customers.

According to Antenna, if one service has a greater ratio of committed customers compared to its partner, the bundle presents a cannibalization risk to the service with fewer curious customers.

And Antenna’s report says that Netflix boasts the highest percentage of committed customers, with 58%.

It’s also the only premium SVOD with more committed customers than curious ones.

That’s likely why Netflix’s has avoided partnerships involving just fellow streaming services, favoring instead collaboration with internet service providers to avoid crossing customer bases.

Just last week, Verizon unveiled a new bundling promotion for its home and wireless internet customers, offering them a year free of Netflix Premium if they also pay for Peacock Premium. 

The difference between these bundles and Antenna’s “potentially cannibalistic” partnerships is that they run through internet providers rather than directly with Netflix’s curious-customer-rich streaming competitors.

With Paramount Global entering key renewal talks with Charter Communications in the second quarter, Lightshed Partners' Richard Greenfield has become the latest equity analyst to question Paramount's ability to carve out the kind of groundbreaking agreement established between Disney and the No. 1 U.S. pay TV operator back in September.

The landmark Disney deal gave wholesale discounts for Charter to resell Disney Plus and other Disney streaming services. The pact will likely serve as “the paradigm for how [Charter] approaches future distribution agreements,“ Greenfield said in a Lightshed blog post.

Paramount Global chief executive Bob Bakish said back in early November that he also wanted to explore similar "hard bundles" with pay TV operators. At the time, another influential equity analyst, MoffettNathanson's Robert Fishman, threw cold water on the plan.

“How incremental to the linear bundle is Paramount Plus?” Fishman asked. “With simulcasts of CBS stations included within the app, including coveted sports rights such as the NFL, we remain skeptical the company will be able to get true wholesale incremental value." 

With Paramount's Charter negotiations now at hand, Greenfield expressed agreement. 

A key Charter objective, he notes, is not to pay for the same content twice.

And while Paramount Plus has exclusive content not carried by Paramount's basic cable networks, Greenfield explains, the current availability of CBS and Nickelodeon on both Charter and Paramount’s streaming service robs the conglomerate of some of its most lucrative bundling opportunities. In fact, four of Paramount Plus' eight trending shows last weekend were from Paramount’s linear TV networks: SpongeBob, Paw Patrol, Survivor and The Neighborhood.

But perhaps most critical to Paramount’s distribution strategy is one key property: the NFL on CBS, which carries historically consistent viewership and the potential to protect other networks.

That was one of the justifications for 2019’s CBS/Viacom merger, which Greenfield says was intended to “use the power of the NFL to protect the carriage of Viacom’s increasingly vulnerable networks.”

However, with NFL available to Paramount+’s lowest-tier, $5.99 ad-supported customers, Paramount is seriously undercutting the earning value of their own channel suite.

"Let’s step back and ask: why are any Paramount networks carried by distributors? Only one reason: the NFL on CBS," Greenfield wrote. "In fact, the entire rationale of the CBS/Viacom merger was to use the power of the NFL to protect the carriage of Viacom’s increasingly vulnerable cable networks. However, with NFL on CBS available on Paramount Plus' low-end, $5.99 ad-supported tier, it has to make distributors wonder why they need to carry the Paramount suite of channels."

Paramount Plus is also available at no additional cost to Walmart Plus subscribers as advertised on the corporation’s website, devaluing the power of NFL programming even further.

By enabling such easy access to sports content via streaming, Greenfield claims that “Paramount has destroyed the value of their content by enabling such easy access to sports content at far too low of a price versus what they expect to be paid for their linear networks by MVPDs.”

Paramount elected not to sell Showtime for $3 billion, and instead incorporated it into their service, offering Paramount Plus to all existing Showtime subscribers.

Paramount has scaled back its production quantity of original content, and according to Greenfield, “is trying to leverage the power of the NFL content that is not exclusive to the bundle,” and therefore lacks the bargaining power needed to tow Paramount.

And he claims that Charter won’t stand for it, likely requiring reduction to affiliate fees paid to Paramount, or for the inclusion of a Paramount Plus Essentials subscription in cooperation with Charter’s networks. If Paramount refuses both of those, Greenfield believes Charter may even drop the networks, a loss of distribution that Paramount can certainly not afford.

The year 2020 is here and TV will, once again, never be the same. Streaming video, subscription services, pirates, connected TVs, interactive programming and much more have changed the way, the where and the how of content consumption.

And it doesn’t stop there. There is so much more that will continue to change. Think of what we already know for 2020:

• Next-Gen TV will start to make ATSC 3.0 a household name.

• New over-the-top services from titans like NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia will join the battle for streaming TV viewers.

• The rumor mill for more mergers and acquisitions is already full, and will continue to reshape the business landscape of video.

Collectively, our industry will thrive if we plan for what’s next. To do so, broadcasters, OTT companies, content owners and technology companies should look ahead. Here are a few predictions:

Bundling: Meet the rebirth of pay TV and the growth of streaming and subscription VOD. Bundling is already happening, but it will increase exponentially. The cross-service TV bundle will move center stage as the perceived wisdom that cord-cutting is decimating the traditional pay TV sector will prove false. With the world’s media powerhouses launching streaming services into an already crowded market, consumers will be confronted with too many siloed options. The result is that many services won’t survive and some cord-cutters, tired of searching for content, may ultimately watch less. To avoid this fate, traditional pay TV programmers and new players will join forces to offer converged, curated “new pay TV” bundles that better meet consumer demand.

Piracy: Whether it’s casual credentials-sharing or the illegal sale of passwords and illicit streaming, piracy will continue to grow. We will see the industry raise the volume about the impact of casual credentials-sharing and the toxicity of streaming piracy and fraudulent, for-profit sharing. While individual operators facing severe piracy situations are already calling for more to be done to combat pirates, we are only at the start of this battle to protect both the value of premium content and operator revenues.

The proof of the severity of the problem is found in the numbers. Synamedia recently unveiled the findings from analyses of two video service providers, which uncovered more than 3 million viewer credentials were compromised across both the dark and open Web over the course of just six months. Additionally, the analysis found these particular video service providers are likely to be losing more than $72 million of potential annual subscription-fee revenue due to password-sharing from roughly 500,000 non-paying users.

These statistics illustrate a microcosm of the real impact piracy is already having in the industry. In order to survive, video providers must defend their livelihood with state-of-the-art technology, the intelligence of experts who think like pirates do and who know how they work, so they can move even faster than the relentless thieves. Simply, they must stay ahead of the game.

Latency: Achieving synchronized latency between live broadcast and OTT streaming at scale will become a ‘must-have’ as live sports streaming goes mainstream. This will require optimizing the entire end-to-end chain for low latency. Using a low-delay encoder is a moot point if the content delivery network (CDN) platform and player introduce delays down the line. Operators will also start to converge their broadcast and IP streams at the headend to help minimize any delay and optimize their workflows.

At the same time, we will also see a flurry of activity around ATSC 3.0 as U.S. broadcasters prepare the technical, commercial and legal ground for rollouts that will open up new application opportunities. It’s no secret that the way TV is viewed has changed since ATSC 1.0 was rolled out. There is no longer one screen in the home where viewing takes place. The TV-watching experience has changed, the platforms have grown in size (or shrunk in some cases) and the options have expanded. With ATSC 3.0, there’s more of nearly everything: More immersive experiences, more personalization and more content and related services.

Hybrid Operations and Cloud: As the move to the cloud accelerates, we will see greater adoption by pay TV providers of solutions to find the optimal balance between capital expenditures and operating expenditures. For example, solutions that offer the ability to launch, scale up and scale down high availability channels for smarter hybrid on-premise and public cloud deployments while keeping a tight control on costs.

From the viewers’ perspective, a hybrid approach takes into consideration their desire for accessible content, superior experiences and reliable services. Consumers expect to be able to watch any show they want, on any device they want, at any time they want. To keep up, companies must consider a blend of broadcast and IP to deliver more viewing options, must have cloud DVR and greater flexibility for a complete viewing experience.

Addressable Advertising: We expect to see new ecosystems and partnerships to address the growing demand for linear TV addressable advertising. This will include more pay TV operator and broadcaster collaborations based upon sharing advanced advertising platforms and audience data to create solutions matching the needs of advertisers and agencies. The entire industry will also need to work together to define a standard way of measuring addressable advertising audiences and outcomes.

However it all plays out, there’s one prediction that is certain to come true: It will be another exciting year in the ongoing evolution and revolution of the TV industry.

Jean-Marc Racine is chief product officer at Synamedia, a London-based video software and services company.

Charter Communications’ decision to place Viacom’s flagship networks – Nickelodeon, MTV, VH1, Spike, BET and Comedy Central – on its priciest video tier not only sucked the air out of Viacom stock, it could have other programmers gasping for breath in carriage negotiations to come.

Charter, the second largest cable operator in the country with 16.8 million subscribers, recently began making Viacom’s “core six” channels available to new customers only via its “Gold” tier, a $99.99 per month tier with more than 200 channels.

Viacom CEO Bob Bakish tried to downplay the move – he said on the programmer’s May 4 earnings call that he did not see it as a broader re-tiering of its networks by other distributors and that it was in talks with Charter. Nevertheless, it still pummeled the stock. Viacom shares already down 7.5% on May 3 as a result of a sector-wide decline amid fears of declining viewership and sluggish ad sales, fell another 7.1% on May 4, closing at $36.46 per share. Shares were up slightly in afternoon trading May 5, to about $36.48 per share.

In a research note to clients Friday, Sanford Bernstein’s Todd Juenger, who has been sounding the alarm for the content business for years, saw Charter’s move as just the beginning of what could be a world of heartache for programmers.

“Some investors have asked us if this is the ‘canary in a coal mine’ for future Viacom distribution problems,” Juenger wrote. “Our answer is, no, Cable One and Suddenlink dropping Viacom entirely was the canary in a coal mine. That was the warning signal. Charter tiering the flagship Viacom networks is more the equivalent of the coal miners ignoring the warning and getting the oxygen sucked away from them. And this happened ~one year before the *real* distribution renewal agreement between Charter and Viacom. We think this tells us how to expect Charter to approach that renewal. Just wait until this spreads to other distributors.”

Whether it spreads to others is the big question. Every distribution deal is different, but all of them include minimum carriage requirements and if a distributor falls below that minimum number, they have to pay more. If for some reason Charter has figured out a way around this, you can bet this will snowball.

Viacom, because its networks skew younger, has always been the bellwether for both boom and gloom in the cable business. It ushered in the reality TV era with the 1992 debut of The Real World, taking the genre to its logical conclusion in 2009’s The Jersey Shore. More recently, it was the first pay TV programmer to feel the effects of SVOD deals on its linear networks, the first to feel the effect of the audience shift to mobile and other devices and the first major programmer to get dropped by mid-sized distributors (Suddenlink and Cable One). Now, it appears that Viacom could be the first major programmer to be relegated to pricey tiers, something that distributors have wanted to do for years, but contractually were never able to do.

Charter has been aggressively rejiggering its programming contracts ever since the completion of its purchase of Time Warner Cable and Bright House, and has faced some pushback in its interpretation of its programming deals from other providers in the past. Those disputes have centered on affiliate fee rates – Charter believed all of its systems were entitled to paying lower TWC rates even in legacy Charter systems that had ongoing deals. The programmers had thought differently.

Viacom, too, holds a different view on Charter’s ability to tier its networks.

“There is a difference of opinion on what is appropriate,” Bakish said. “We have a very strong point of view and are in conversations about it. I believe this will get resolved. “

San Francisco -- Even more than "convergence," the terms "clustering," "bundling" and "stickiness" were the buzzwords at the CTAM Summit here last week, as marketers gathered to discuss the challenges facing them in stepping up introductions of digital cable, telephone and high-speed Internet products.

The annual Cable and Telecommunications Association for Marketing conference drew a better-than-projected crowd of more than 2,600. General-session speakers such as AT&T Broadband & Internet Services CEO Leo J. Hindery Jr., CNET CEO Halsey Minor and Benchmark Capital general partner Bruce Dunlevie drew standing-room-only crowds in the large ballroom at the San Francisco Marriott.

Not all of the attendees were cable marketers: Because of its proximity to Silicon Valley, the summit drew attendees who were interested in the anticipated convergence between television and the Internet.

The show also drew a healthy number of international cable executives who were interested in hearing U.S. success stories. And there were more than a few well-known former cable and satellite executives between jobs who were as quick to exchange resumes as others traded business cards.

But their out-of-work status carried no stigma at the CTAM Summit, considering the fact that one of the more popular masters of ceremony there, CTAM Summit co-chair Lou Borrelli, is himself without a full-time gig.

Cable marketers were urged to get their operational houses in order before they move too quickly to new product launches.

"It's hard to do many things at once well," Dunlevie cautioned, saying MSOs would be wiser to improve customer service or programming than to branch out into local telephony.

"One of the key challenges I see is the healthy tension between deployment of new services and hanging on to our [current] customers," said David Watson, newly appointed executive vice president of sales and marketing and customer service for Comcast Corp.'s Comcast Cable Communications Inc.

Some of the things MSOs need to focus on operationally are answering the phones in a timely manner, solving customer problems and sending technicians out when they say they will, Watson said. "We have to do all of this right before we can go forward with the new services," he added.

At a Tuesday-afternoon panel, Watson recounted a complaint by a customer who had called Comcast with a problem only to have the operator hang up on him after saying, "I have nothing I can do for you."

Of course Comcast, like other MSOs, has started to deploy new services in some of its markets.

MSOs are doing so not just to put their collective marketing prowess to the test, but also as a defensive strategy against other communications industries and, probably more important, to make good on promises made to Wall Street.

Speaking of the importance of adding new services to help protect the core business, Hindery said, "Retention is always a challenge, especially in a fiercely competitive market. Our goal is to market bundled product and service packages that are so attractive and value-oriented that they become what I call 'sticky.'"

In a test in Fremont, Calif., AT&T Broadband is offering a 25 percent discount on long-distance and local telephone service for cable customers, although the bills are not yet bundled.

AT&T Broadband has 1.4 million digital-cable customers, with expectations of hitting 1.8 million by the end of the year, not including those expected to come over to it from MediaOne Group Inc. next year.

The MSO also aims to gain 25 percent penetration of homes passed for its AT&T@Home high-speed online service within the next five years, Hindery said.

Minor cautioned that the battle over open access to cable pipes could work against cable, advising cable marketers to remind potential data subscribers that other Internet brands are available through their broadband pipe.

"Open access is actually good because companies will pay cable operators for a place on their pipe, and it will make it good for consumers," he added.

Time Warner Cable, which just launched its first digital-cable markets earlier this summer, has already signed up nearly 40,000 customers in its first four markets, chairman and CEO Joe Collins said. The MSO is targeting a deployment of 400,000 digital set-top boxes by the end of the year, and it is in launch mode in 22 markets.

This fall, Time Warner will launch its Road Runner high-speed online service in Manhattan to heavy pent-up demand, Collins said. At the same time, the MSO will launch digital cable to New York City's outer boroughs, such as Brooklyn and Queens. Next year, Manhattan and the outer boroughs will have both services.

"The New York market is 1.2 million subscribers," Collins said. "We'd simply get overwhelmed if we offered our products to everyone all at once."

While continued clustering will help MSOs to advertise more efficiently across a given market, Collins expects that at least initially, Time Warner will only market as heavily as needed to fill the customer pipeline. "Otherwise, we have too many people in the backlog," he said, "and they get mad if they have to wait too long."

An early believer in the power of bundles, Cox Communications Inc. already has several-thousand customers who buy all three of its services -- voice, video and data -- although they're not yet bundled under a single bill.

"Ultimately, we want to give customers a choice of a single or multiple bills," Cox executive director of marketing David Pugliese said. "Some customers don't want to pay $150 at once for cash-flow reasons."

Pugliese added that Cox plans to offer bundles to drive revenues, to reduce acquisition costs by sending a single marketing piece instead of three, to discourage competitors from coming into its markets and "to make it difficult -- even painful -- for customers to downgrade" when they're pitched by direct-broadcast satellite, for example.

He stressed that brand extension would be crucial in the transition from a video-only provider to a supplier of multiple communications services.

"What good does it do you to offer new products and services if your customers only know you and trust you as a cable company?" Pugliese asked.

Even as MSOs protect their core video business and continue to roll out new services, they must keep at least one eye out for new consumer applications that are likely to gain force in the next five years, such as electronic commerce, video-on-demand and new services yet to be invented.

But not every new idea will win cable customers over.

"The saying, 'If we build it, they will come' just doesn't apply anymore," Oxygen Media CEO Geraldine Laybourne warned. "If you don't build it with the consumer in mind, they won't stay."

Collins gained some perspective on consumers' interactive buying habits through Time Warner's two-way Full Service Network trial in Orlando, Fla., in 1992.

Initially, it's hard to get customers to buy certain products, like clothing or curtains, online, Collins said, but consumers do like to buy stamps online.

"People don't like to go to the post office," he added. "It's kind of scary there."

Jim Forkan and Hank Kim contributed to this story.