👉 Background: YouTube TV is the platform’s live TV streaming service. It bundles over 100 cable channels together. It launched back in 2017 and has been a bit of a slow burn for the video giants.

👉 What happened: Over the last 5 years, Youtube TV has been building their offering and features (like no spoilers for sports results). Now, YouTube’s announced that YouTube TV has hit five million subscribers.

👉 What else: It means YouTube’s bet on a content bundling business model is potentially starting to pay off. Sadly, we don’t have it in Oz yet.

What's the key learning?

💡Content bundling is when a whole bunch of different content products are bundled under the one subscription, kinda like Foxtel, Optus or even Austar

💡 The issue with content bundling is that you can often get stuck paying for a bunch of channels you don’t want (Hellooooo E! or Cartoon Network). That’s why we’ve got so many unbundled content services these days - think Netflix, Stan, Binge, Amazon Prime. Paramount+, Kayo (...and the list goes on).

💡 But YouTubeTV is swimming against the tide. It has been going all in on content bundling. It thinks content bundling doesn’t need to die, it just needs to be reborn in a better form. And five million subscribers are on board!

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