Skinny or super? Answering the wrong question about bundling at StreamTV, Denver
by Giles Tongue | 21 Jul 2026
- Charter: Spectrum churn reduced by 30% through Super Bundling
- DirectTV: 60% of new customer acquisitions are new to the brand through Genre Pack skinny bundles, retention doubles; highest ever inflow through MiEspañol Genre Pack thanks to World Cup
- LG create value through bundling after the TV is bought
- Paramount+ – bundled and been bundled, and look at creating longer term relationships
At StreamTV in Denver, I promised a Harry Kane England World Cup shirt to the best panellist, decided by audience noise.
Stefanie Ball of DIRECTV took the shirt. But the business question did not produce one winner.
The average American now pays for 5.2 subscriptions, at around $69 a month. And over a third of those subscriptions arrive through a bundle or an indirect channel.
That figure comes from our Subscription Signals research at Bango, and it’s validated elsewhere – Omdia estimates over 50% of SVOD subscriptions in key markets are now bought through bundling.
So when Evan Shapīro asked me to curate a session on The New Bundle for his Media Universe Summit at StreamTV in Denver, the question I wanted answered was simple. If bundling is supposed to solve subscription fatigue and industry churn, what’s the actual win factor?
Four people building very different bundles joined me on stage: Scott Barton (Charter), Stefanie Ball (DIRECTV), Matthew Durgin (LG) and Ethan Grey (Paramount). Here’s what I took away.
Charter: go big – Super Bundling
Spectrum includes 11 of the most popular SVOD apps inside its TV pack – $127 of value, month in, month out. Over 50% of eligible customers have activated at least one app. Once they realize the value is there, they take four on average. And churn in the core business has dropped by a third. Scott reminds that Spectrum TV customers are nearly all also broadband customers, so that reduction in churn is very valuable across TV and broadband.
Scott was refreshingly honest about the hard part. Activation is bumpy, and customers carry scar tissue from decades of “free for three months, then we charge you” offers. These apps are included in perpetuity, so the job now is education. As he put it, we’re in the first inning.
DIRECTV: go skinny – Genre Packs
Stefanie’s team took the inverse approach: genre packs. Slim bundles built around sports,
entertainment, kids and Spanish language, combining live TV, the top streaming apps and
search in one place.
“Helping you find the content you want very quickly and getting you right there.” – Stefanie Ball, Vice President & General Manager of Residential Growth, DIRECTV
The result? 60% of genre pack customers come from segments DIRECTV could never reach before. And when customers authenticate into the streaming app embedded in their pack, survival rates double.
Your genre pack choice tells DIRECTV something, and that signal shapes the marketing that follows. World Cup football is driving their best-ever inflow to the MiEspañol Genre Pack.
LG: the reversal – bundling adds value after the initial sale
Here’s the one that surprised me. Matt explained that although LG had successfully bundled hardware – the soundbar with TV for a long time, LG’s service bundles never really drove TV sales, the correlation was weak. So they flipped the objective. The bundle now exists to drive engagement in the services LG has invested in, like pairing a controller with Xbox cloud gaming. Their annual Streaming Weeks give TV owners a familiar window of trial offers, year after year, across a relationship that can last seven years.
LG has also invested in licensing content so that a newly connected television has something useful to play as soon as it joins Wi-Fi, without asking the customer to reach for a credit card.
Paramount: bundles you didn’t know were bundles
Ethan shared Paramount has “bundled and been bundled”. Fly Delta and you can watch Paramount+ and Pluto on board, then keep it for 24 hours after landing. That’s a bundle. Walmart+ includes Paramount+. Also a bundle. And Paramount+ bundled with its own Showtime subscription, before it became part of the Premium sub.
Then he shared something buried in Apple’s WWDC developer documentation: App Store publishers can now bundle any subscription with any other subscription. Any two. Any five. Ethan went looking for commentary on it and found almost none. A whole new venue for bundling just appeared, and Apple isn’t shouting about it.
I think this is a really interesting development. We’ve seen a big rise in content providers bundling each other’s brand, and often that’s to take advantage of reach into each other’s customer bases, which makes a lot of sense. It drives acquisition and can result in extra stickiness as value is often offered (a discount or free trial period). App store bundling offers reach, but not a in new way – brands can already access App stores customers. So will these giant D2C brands be prepared to show a discount in the App store as a bundle, right next to their full price product? We’ll have to wait and see.
Where they all landed
The bundle is not the final transaction. It’s the opening move in a relationship – one that leads to engagement, upsell, events and deeper subscriber connections. And sometimes it won’t be content at all. Gaming, reading, yoga. Theme park tickets, merchandise, adventures and cruises. The New Bundle meets the customer at the right moment, with the thing they want.
But that is the start of a relationship. We might use words like retention or upsell opportunity, the subscriber sees it as simplicity, better value, and easy access to what they love.
Or as we closed the panel: give them what they want, the way they want it, and charge them for it. So while Stefanie took home the football shirt, the panel did not crown one commercial model. Skinny bundles won by opening up access to a new audience.
Super Bundling won when abundance increased the value of an existing relationship and reduced churn. LG showed how bundling can bring a device to life after the sale.
Paramount showed how distribution can become the first step in a much wider subscriber relationship. The best bundle is built around a clear customer moment and a clear commercial job.
Give people what they want. Put it where they already are. Make the value easy to find. Then earn the next interaction.
