Already a big deal for retail consumer goods, MyBundle believes Black Friday could be a key marketing event for the streaming video business, too.
The day after Thanksgiving (November 29 this year), Black Friday has already been a thing in premium subscription streaming for several years, with services including Hulu offering signup discounts.
“It’s turned into a massive streaming deal time,” said Jason Cohen, co-founder and CEO of MyBundle, in an interview with StreamTV Insider.
But MyBundle, a SaaS company that connects broadband operators, streaming suppliers and consumers, wants to kick it up a notch further. The company this week shared details of its new Black Friday industry marketing program, during which it will publish all Black Friday deals being offered by subscription service providers on a landing page co-branded with its broadband partners.
In addition to the website, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based MyBundle is also providing its broadband operator partners with “everything they need” to market to customers during the shopping event.
MyBundle’s business plan uses “streaming credits,” which broadband providers — looking to get out or stay out of low-margin linear video — pass onto their customers to purchase premium video services. The logic: customers who are regularly streaming video are more likely to subscribe to high-speed internet and less inclined to churn from broadband services if they have a streaming service attached.
The discounts offered during Black Friday provide an excellent opportunity for MyBundle’s 270 broadband supplier clients to make those credits stretch further, Cohen said.
“One of our large broadband provider [clients] is doing a customer-appreciation event, giving all their customers $20 to spend on streaming services,” Cohen said. Another client is offering a promotion in which prospective customers get $150 in streaming credits if they sign up for new internet service. Existing customers can get $15 a month in streaming credits over the next six months if they upgrade their broadband tier.
With Black Friday still a month away, streaming providers have yet to announce their event promotions. Cohen, however, believes that because subscription streaming has gotten more competitive than ever, “I think you’ll see even more deals this year than last.”
As for MyBundle, the five-year-old startup continues to expand, with a roster of small- and mid-sizes telecom clients that include Frontier, Quantum Fiber, Fidium Fiber, Ziply Fiber and Brightspeed, among many others.
Through its broadband provider clients’ collective customer bases, MyBundle now reaches 14 million consumers across the U.S. And it now has a distributed workforce of 17 full-time employees, including its recently appointed first Chief Revenue Officer Michael Goldstein.