MyBundle is teaming up with Tastemade — a streaming channel producing food and travel-related programming — to bring the media company’s SVOD service, Tastemade+, to MyBundle’s platform and broadband partner network.
MyBundle is an online platform connecting consumers, streaming services, and broadband providers. It offers a consumer-facing marketplace for live and on-demand streaming services and a co-branded offering connecting its partnered streaming services to its growing base of broadband service provider (BSP) partners.
Tastemade+ offers over 750 hours of streaming content and a healthy library of recipes and cooking videos. Subscribing to the service will now be made available through MyBundle’s Streaming App Marketplace — which currently incorporates over 150 streaming services, according to the release — and MyBundle Streaming Choice (an offering for providers to bundle or give away streaming services as they look to reel in and keep high-value broadband customers).
The agreement will make Tastemade+ available to MyBundle’s over 180 BSP partners that serve more than 10 million customers nationwide, according to MyBundle Co-founder and CEO Jason Cohen. MyBundle will also take on billing and customer care for Tastemade+ to simplify the process of subscribing, managing billing and accessing customer support through MyBundle’s platform — “a bill on behalf of” as Cohen put it in an interview with StreamTV Insider.
Part of the aim of distribution through MyBundle and its BSP partner network is to drive incremental new Tastemade+ subscriptions.
Cohen explained that the partnership is a paradigm in the company’s unique position to help streaming services connect to its subscription management system and strong partner network to win new customers, “whether they're leaving the legacy TV ecosystem [and] wanting some kind of food content, or cord cutters and cord nevers who are just looking for new services.”
Tastemade Distribution & Partnerships Manager Taylor Shwide noted in the release that the continued pattern of cord-cutting makes the partnership with MyBundle all the more exciting.
“MyBundle gives customers an easy and seamless way to cherry-pick their favorite channels and create their own streaming package,” she stated.
Bridging streaming bundles and BSPs
Following strong growth throughout 2021 and 2022, MyBundle passed the 150 mark for BSP partners utilizing its streaming, SVOD and AVOD service aggregation tools earlier this year.
While the rise in its partner network was aided by its deals with the NCTC and NRTC in 2022, Cohen explained in an earlier interview that the growth wasn’t strictly from those industry groups and that MyBundle was tuned into a larger trend of the broadband and cable industry reevaluating their roles in video in 2023 and beyond.
“The common denominator is there's an opportunity for broadband providers to have a relationship with all their broadband customers, not just traditional linear TV,” Cohen commented in the latest interview.
Cohen said MyBundle’s focus is to bring on more partners like Tastemade and Sling TV (which partnered last year to integrate billing), and by bringing along its rapidly growing broadband partner network, there is a lot of interconnected value for all of its three stakeholders.
For a broadband provider, MyBundle’s philosophy, according to Cohen, is: “[If] you’re giving a promotion to a customer, and you're trying to get them to sign up for broadband, why are you giving them a $200 Home Depot card?”
Instead, keeping these types of promotions within the streaming ecosystem further incentivizes streaming services to join the network and gain more customers.The approach also solves a lot of consumer pain points around managing and paying for all of their streaming subscriptions, Cohen added. MyBundle’s marketplace can then aid consumers in other areas of frustration within the fragmented streaming industry such as content discovery and management.
“The future of TV is really each consumer, each household basically being able to assemble their own bundle… the more complicated it gets, the more value a third party can add,” he said.