- Today, I'm making five cord cutting predictions for 2022.
Now, looking backward 2020 obviously was a crazy year
in a lot of ways, including for cord cutters.
2021 when it came to streaming,
kinda seemed to settle down a little bit.
So what does 2022 have in store?
Well, I've got a few ideas.
And today we're going to throw away
the Craig is always right mug because,
(upbeat music)
yeah, who knows what these ones.
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All right, everybody.
Thanks for watching today.
If you liked this video, if it's fun for you,
then go ahead and hit that like button,
but let's get started on this.
Okay, five predictions.
Some of them are a little bit wild
and a little bit nebulous, others are very specific.
But let's start with number one.
YouTube TV will raise its price to match Hulu.
Now, if you missed it a few weeks ago,
Hulu raised its price to 70 bucks, from 65 up to 70.
Now, they did include in that the Disney Plus bundle.
So you get Disney Plus, ESPN Plus, and well, Hulu,
which you already had, right?
So for five bucks extra,
they're giving you a little bit more.
But 70 bucks, that's a lot of money.
YouTube TV is still at $65 a month,
much like the base package for FUBU.
My prediction will be that both of those,
but especially YouTube TV, that's the important one,
they will raise their price to match Hulu this year.
How are they gonna do that?
What are they gonna include?
To justify that, I'm not sure yet.
But by the end of 2022,
YouTube TV and Hulu will be at parody once again.
Prediction number two is that Roku's streaming devices
will go up in price.
Now this is going to happen to a lot of streaming devices
for a few reasons.
I mean, we're dealing with inflation right now.
There's the semiconductor shortage that's projected
to last through the end of 2022.
And I think that that will come into play.
So a lot of devices we'll probably see their prices
upping by five or 10 bucks.
But I think this is especially true of Roku
because of their recent deal with Google,
where they wanted to keep YouTube and YouTube TV
on the Roku platform, so they made a deal.
Part of that deal had to do with the AV1 codec.
What that is doesn't really matter,
this is basically just how your devices decompress
the video that you watch on them.
And Google requires the AV1 codec be used,
but that requires a new chip set and Roku doesn't have it.
And so they're going to have to probably implement that
in their new devices going forward,
which could add up the price on those.
So we'll see if those other factors make it.
So all of our streaming devices get their prices raised
a little bit, but I'm especially worried for Roku.
Prediction three is pretty simple actually,
HBO Max will blow past the 50 million sub club.
Now currently, HBO Max is at 45 million subscribers.
They lost several million when they were removed
from the prime video channels.
So hopefully from their perspective,
it won't be too difficult to recoup those subscribers.
But this one is tricky because when you look
at HBO subscribers, there's HBO Max,
but HBO non-max is still a thing.
And when you count all of those together,
there's another 15 or 20 million subscribers just on HBO.
So do I think they're gonna catch Disney Plus
who have 118 million at last count or Netflix,
they've got 214 Million subscribers?
No, but HBO Max is going to keep climbing that ladder.
They're going to do very, very well in 2022.
And my prediction is yes, they're going to blow
past that 50 million subscriber mark for HBO Max
and we'll see them sitting around 60 to 65,
I bet, if not more.
Now you can call that wishful thinking if you want,
because I love HBO Max.
I want them to do well
because I've loved what they've put together so far.
And I think it'll be even better when the merger
with Discovery Plus takes place in the middle of next year,
when they're under new management,
that knows a little bit more about how to run
a service like this, we'll see.
This prediction looks even further into the future.
I think in 2022, live TV subscription rates will drop by 3%,
but going forward, I think it's gonna drop even faster.
So what do I mean by this?
When I talk about live TV subscription rates,
I'm not just talking about cable and satellite,
although they are included in that,
but I'm talking about all live TV providers.
So we're talking about YouTube TV, Hulu Live, Hubo,
all of that stuff included within live TV,
pay TV distribution.
So if we look at the numbers over the last decade,
we can see that as far as households in the US
that have some form of paid TV, live TV subscription,
that number has been dropping by one to 3% every year
for the last decade or so.
I don't think that that is going to change next year.
It's still going to drop I think by 3%,
I think it will be one of the big drops,
but going forward in 2023,
once the NFL Sunday ticket contract is sold,
we're gonna see that drop go even faster.
There will be, sorry to tell you, AT&T,
a mass exodus from Direct TV once NFL Sunday ticket is sold.
And moving forward, looking forward past 2022,
once this happens, once NFL Sunday ticket is sold,
and we're gonna see a lot more stuff
along the Prime Video model.
So if you log into Prime Video,
you'll see a lot of on-demand content with some live sports.
I think eventually this will be a really normal thing
with whichever streaming service you log into,
probably not Netflix within the foreseeable future,
but hey, Apple TV was toying with this,
having a bunch of on-demand content with live sports.
They were thinking about buying NFL Sunday ticket.
Maybe they still will,
although it looks less likely these days.
But yeah, I think this will be the norm going forward,
where you've got a lot of on-demand content,
some live sports, maybe some live news,
kind of mixed together in these streaming services.
Speaking of live TV, my final prediction
is that we are going to lose a major player
in the live TV streaming market.
Now I'm not talking about the fly by night services
that pop up, they last six months,
and then they get shut down
because they're horribly illegal.
No, I'm talking about the major live TV streamers.
And if one of them is going to go and I think it will,
my money is on Philo.
Now don't get me wrong,
I'm not saying this because I don't like Philo, I do.
It's just going to be really tough for Philo to compete
when they have no sports programming,
no live news programming,
and a lot of the stuff that they're offering
is available now on say Discovery Plus.
So while I like Philo TV,
I do think it's going to struggle
compared to the other services
because it has no sports programming,
because it has no news programming,
It's counting on a lot of this content
that is already available elsewhere,
and as the idea of live TV altogether
kind of diminishes over time,
Philo TV is gonna be the first one to go.
I'm not sure I see them making it out of 2022.
So there are my predictions.
I wanna hear yours as well.
Head to the comments,
let me know what you think is gonna happen in 2022.
And let's make sure we regroup again
at the end of next year and see how much I was right about.
I'd like to think that I'm gonna be right
with all of these, but chances are good
that I got something wrong.
So we'll regroup the end of next year
and see what exactly happened.
All right, thanks for watching everybody.
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