There may be a secret winner of the streaming wars, and it could end up saving you money

By Lukas I. Alpert

The unwinding of the TV bundle was bad for cable companies, but Charter's reassembling of a bundle of streaming services is helping it dig out and may ultimately be a money saver for consumers

Charter Communications, whose consumer brand is Spectrum, appears to have slowed the decline in cable subscribers through new packages that include numerous streaming offerings at a discounted cost.

Cutting the cord gave consumers more choice about what to watch on TV, but in some ways they have ended up with less.

Viewers now find themselves confronted by a dizzying array of streaming services, all offering different slices of the viewing universe. To cobble together the package of content you want requires subscribing to multiple services at ever-increasing cost.

Compared with the old pay-TV bundle, this has often resulted in consumers paying more for less.

Over the past decade, cable providers have taken a beating as viewers shifted increasingly to streaming. Charter Communications (CHTR), the largest pay-TV provider in the U.S., is trying to flip the script, reassembling a bundle of streaming services that it says costs less than buying all the services on their own.

It appears it might be working.

"Charter has, uniquely, recreated the bundle which had once made linear TV such a great business (for media companies). Everything included, whether linear or streaming, for one price," media analyst Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson Research wrote in a note to clients. "A consumer in the Charter package doesn't have to ponder whether a particular streaming service does or doesn't have a particular show worth watching."

Charter, which operates under the consumer brand Spectrum, charges $110 for its TV Select Plus bundle - which includes services like Disney+, ESPN+, HBOMax, Paramount+, Fox One, Peacock, AMC+ and others, plus over 160 live channels. If purchased individually, those streaming services would cost $126, according to Charter.

A person familiar with the matter said Charter is close to a deal to add Netflix to its Spectrum bundle, as well. A Netflix (NFLX) representative didn't immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

Charter is not alone in trying to bring together its own channels with outside streaming providers in one consumer package. Comcast's (CMCSA) Xfinity similarly offers bundles of streaming services.

But Moffett noted that Charter's offerings have so far moved the needle for its business more than its competitors' bundling efforts have. In the first quarter, Charter reported losing 60,000 cable customers, a marked improvement from the 180,000 it lost in the same quarter in 2025.

That represented the fewest first-quarter subscriber losses the company had seen in a decade. Moffett said that means Charter has slowed its cable-customer decline to 1.3% per quarter compared with almost 10% just two years ago, something he attributed to the streaming packages the company is now selling.

These packages are not for everyone, of course, but will appeal more to people who watch a lot of sports and television in general. But rebundling will likely help create some kind of equilibrium for cable providers that have been faced with a dramatically eroding customer base.

Charter faces other problems and has seen its stock price fall 25% in the last six months, largely driven by bigger-than-expected declines in the number of internet-service customers it has.

Moffett said the move to recreate a bundled offering taps into what made the pay-TV business so successful in the first place, while perhaps solving some of the thorniest issues consumers have faced in the streaming revolution: figuring out which service you actually need to watch what you want.

As a business model, the traditional cable bundle was successful because it gave consumers two options - all or nothing. When faced with that choice, Moffett argued, consumers rarely opted for nothing.

Back then, if you didn't like what you were watching, you switched the channel. Now you just drop a service entirely at the click of a button, when a sports season ends or you're done bingeing a favorite show. That has led to a rise across the industry in churn, or the percentage of customers who drop a service in a given month. For some streamers, monthly churn can run as high as 10%.

While the broad move toward cord cutting and a la carte programming has put significant pressure on pay-TV providers, it has also created a plethora of unforeseen problems for streaming services.

Streamers are now faced with having to assemble the broadest range of content on their platforms to keep subscribers onboard for longer. That costs money, whether for the price of producing high-quality shows or licensing them from others.

Moffett said that, in the old days, television channels didn't have to worry about irking customers with rising costs, because that relationship was handled by a middleman - the cable companies. Now streamers deal directly with their customers.

All of this contributes to churn, which has made streaming companies a lesser cash cow than the cable setup of old. It also has created a far more challenging environment for consumers, who are left wondering if they will be able to watch what they want without having to pay for something else.

So a return to a bundle could slow churn and reduce pricing friction between a streaming company and its customers.

"The downside of the new model is, of course, churn. Customers can and do leave, often as soon as their favorite show's season has been binged," Moffett said. "What kept them once upon a time, and still does, was/is sheer breadth, i.e. 'always having something to watch.' Scale matters. But scale isn't measured by the size of the company. It is measured by the size of the bundle."

-Lukas I. Alpert

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