Triple Play
Categories: Company Management
Well, you know the baseball term, right? Three outs in one play. The batter flies out to the second baseman, who steps on the bag while the runner is off, then throws the ball to the first baseman, and...blammo. Side retired.
That's about the only connection here: three things happened at once.
Triple Play refers to a formerly famous marketing slogan from the cable industry wherein, during the advent of the early internet era, they offered three things anew: normal cable television, internet services, and telephony, like via your old POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) with the same dial-up number you held before (i.e. not just talking over Skype).
Those were the three plays, and they were a Thing because the cable industry realized that, very soon, the old line telephony industry on its own would be dead, as people would just use cell phones for everything as cell connectivity got better and better.
They also realized that, soon, content producers could just make their own vertical channels with a "web address," and interested viewers could just pay ESPN directly for video services. They wouldn't need to go through Comcast as a broker. And with 5G, i.e. very fast wireless internet services coming...well then, um, where is there a place for the old cable industry?
The notion of Triple Play was that, with such ease and convenience, why wouldn't everyone just stick with cable?
Well, they didn't. Cords were cut. And today, the industry is in gentle free fall, with subscribers leaving by the droves. Triple play sorta staved off death for a bit, but that Grim Reaper looks pretty hungry standing just outside the windows of the industry, tapping, tapping, evermore.
