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Personally, I’d be fine with paying for a college football streaming app and occasionally a movie streaming app. I usually subscribe to Netflix during the dark of winter, and then drop it in March. I haven’t had cable in years. I get my news from FR or streaming, e.g., Real America’s Voice, NewsMax, etc. I watch most college football on over-the-air TV. This month I had a subscription to Peacock to watch the Week 2 Penn State game. That was 5 bucks and change. That’s cheaper than going to a bar, which I’ll do when I want to see a game on FS1 or ESPN. I dropped my Peacock subscription on Monday.

But that’s me. I’m cheap and I don’t have much interest in the hundreds of cable channels that show mindless drivel. Ideally, I’d pay $10 per month during college football season for a streaming app. That’s about double of what ESPN charges cable companies per subscriber.

I think the market will fracture like it is doing today, i.e., antenna, cable, and streaming, followed by consolidation to streaming on a per entertainment category basis. There’s a happy medium in what the category includes. For sports, I think a single team streaming is too granular. There won’t be enough subscribers for quality presentation that produces a profit. If it is too broad, say all sports, it will be too expensive. So something in between would work. I’d be satisfied with Big Ten sports or maybe all NCAA football and or sports if the price was reasonable. I suppose people that have broader interests than me would be willing to purchase subscriptions to multiple streaming apps and it would still be cheaper than their current cable bill.

I saw a statistic that something like a third of the people who cut the cord do not go to any streaming—they just go cold turkey on the sports and/or entertainment.

Every consumer has their own preferences—and there will be no Goldilocks that works for any large bloc.

Streaming services are slowly learning this while they bleed cash.

They will catch on—and eventually their investors will figure it out as well.

Just a further thought—one of the iron rules of marketing is that if the customer is paying you for your product (like cable TV) any change they make is very risky for the company.

At the moment of change they may “zero base budget” and look very hard at what they want for the product.

Sports fans are notorious for being “seasonal”, particularly during football season—when the season is over many (most?) will stop paying for that stream.

Entertainment fans may buy a streaming service for a few “big hits” and then cancel after that.

These services cannot survive under such a regime.

The industry insiders know it—they have the numbers.