Media Has Always Cycled Between Bundling and Unbundling — Streaming Is Just the Latest Turn

Cable bundled channels for convenience and cross-subsidy. Streaming unbundled that, promising consumers they'd only pay for what they wanted. A decade later, the streaming market itself is crowded enough that consumers are assembling their own de facto bundles across five or six subscriptions — and services are responding with bundled pricing again, just under a different name.

This isn't a failure of streaming's original promise; it's a structural cycle that shows up whenever a bundling technology gets disrupted by an unbundling one. Unbundling wins early because choice feels like an unambiguous good. But as the number of unbundled options grows, the transaction cost of managing them all starts to outweigh the benefit of granular choice, and a new bundle — often assembled by whoever has the best distribution — quietly re-emerges.

The lesson generalizes well beyond media: unbundling is rarely a permanent state. It's a phase in a cycle that eventually swings back, usually captured by whichever player figures out how to bundle the fragments first.