Streaming costs too high? MyBundle 'shaves the cord' for consumers

Cutting the cord has been a trend among consumers looking to save money on traditional cable. MyBundle Co-Founder and CEO Jason Cohen joins Yahoo Finance to discuss how his business is helping consumers "shave" the cord to save money on streaming.

Cohen explains how the streaming ecosystem has become complicated: "Think about steps. Step one is what is the right service for me? That's what we're doing today. If we fast forward all the way to the end goal, which we are doing with our broadband providers, is our broadband providers are giving not just discounts, but giving them away for free. Sign up for a gig, get $100 of streaming credits. Sign up or upgrade to a gig and we'll give you this service six months for free, so we're really working with the broadband industry to help make those offers a reality."

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Editor's note: This article was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video transcript

JOSH LIPTON: You've heard of cutting the cord but our next guest is helping consumers shave the cord. MyBundle is helping package streaming and cable options for viewers in a constantly changing streaming landscape. For more, we have MyBundle co-founder and CEO, Jason Cohen. Jason, it's good to have you. Maybe to start, Jason, just for viewers who might not be familiar, just walk us through a little bit more about MyBundle. What do consumers turn to you for?

JASON COHEN: Sure. No, Josh, first, thanks for having me. So we do a bunch of different things, which always makes this fun. The first thing we do is we help consumers, as you said, shave the cord, looking for an alternative to a cable or satellite TV package. We help them find the YouTube TVs, the Hulu Lives, the Slings, which one of them has the channels that they need, which makes it super easy to save a lot of money.

So for consumers, we help them do that we also go into finding the best package of streaming services for cord-cutters or cord-nevers, helping you find shows and movies across your services, talk about watch lists and what comes next. So that's how we're helping consumers really navigate this new very complicated streaming ecosystem. And then we partner, which I'm sure we'll get to, but we partner with the broadband industry and the streaming services themselves to really bring it all together and just make the ecosystem work better.

JULIE HYMAN: Jason, do-- so do people get sort of a discount on any of the services when they're bundled together? I mean, that's something that the likes of Verizon are starting to offer here. Or is this more about tailoring it so people can get the stuff that they want to watch?

JASON COHEN: Yeah, great question. So think about steps, like step one is, what is the right service for me? And that's what we're doing today. If we fast forward all the way to the end goal, which we're doing with our broadband providers, is our broadband providers are giving not just discounts, but giving them away for free. Sign up for a gig, get $100 of streaming credits. Sign up or upgrade to a gig, and we'll give you this service for six months for free. So we're really working with the broadband industry to help make those offers a reality.

You mentioned Verizon with their Plus Play. Think of it as Plus Play for the rest of the broadband industry. And there are about 3,000 internet providers out there. It's kind of crazy. And so that platform sitting between those broadband providers and the streaming services out there.

JOSH LIPTON: And Jason, there's so many streaming services at this point, it's hard to keep track. I mean, do consumers-- do they want all these options? Is there demand there?

JASON COHEN: Yeah. So we think-- from our studies and from other studies and from obviously talking to consumers, it's not that they want less. It just needs to be simple. I say you don't need consolidation in the streaming industry. You do need aggregation. So if it's easy for consumers to bundle if Julie, like you mentioned, if when you-- the more you bundle, the more you save, which is where we think this is all heading, ultimately consumers don't want less. They just need somebody to help them figure it all out and manage it all.

JULIE HYMAN: How do you guys make money, Jason? Do you-- do you charge a fee? Do you collect fees from these broadband companies? How does that work?

JASON COHEN: Yeah. So again, great question. So a couple of ways. So what we do is basically the broadband providers pay us what we like to think very low monthly SaaS fee. But what this is really also about is actually helping the media companies, the streaming services navigate this world as well. As you listen to their earnings calls, they're all talking about bundling and finding new customers and retaining those customers. And how do they do it?

Well, what MyBundle is doing is aggregating the broadband industry for each streaming service so they only have to come to MyBundle for one integration and get access to we have now over 220 broadband providers with 13 million internet customers that are my bundle partners. And so the second part is getting paid by the streaming services the same way they pay those little companies like Google or Apple or Amazon.

The difference is we're not big tech, we're not trying to eat their lunch. We're a little tech, and we're saying we're here to help. And so we earn that revenue from the streaming service and then share that with the broadband provider. And so we're really-- everything MyBundle does it's all about creating those win-win-wins for our consumers, our broadband partners, and the streaming services to make this whole streaming ecosystem a lot simpler.

JOSH LIPTON: And you know, Jason, there's a new sports streaming service coming. Disney, Fox, and Warner Brothers teaming up. Just interested to get your thoughts on there. What do you think the reception is going to be like? Is the demand there for that?

JASON COHEN: Yeah. So we know one of the things with our tool is, right, we know what channels people pick and what they're interested. And there definitely are consumers that are more into sports versus not. Just quickly, like before starting MyBundle, I was actually in the finance world. I watched you guys back in my old job at a hedge fund, investing in media and telecom.

And the reason we started MyBundle was specifically because the thought was this is all going to fragment with the internet. The internet's going to come, we're going to go from a closed system to an open ecosystem. The middle is going to be messy. We're right now right square in the middle, where there's going to be more services and more choice and more options. And what we're all about is matching up the people that want those channels and don't need the other channels and the idea of helping people find that.

And so we do think there is demand. There's a lot more demand for streaming. We think there's going to be a lot more shifting over from traditional facilities-based TV over to streaming. And specifically, whether it's this and then ESPN direct-to-consumer, which will come the next-- which is a skinnier skinny version of that, we think there's going to be more and more options. And that's not a bad thing. But it's not a bad thing as long as a company like MyBundle or some of the other companies like the large, large cable providers or, like you said, Verizon, somebody needs to be there to help the consumer put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

And we think Humpty Dumpty, not to kill that metaphor, but it's going to look a lot better. And the end result of this is way, way better for consumers than how it used to be when they have that little bit of help.

JULIE HYMAN: Jason, thanks so much. Appreciate it.

JASON COHEN: Thank you so much for having me.