• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, June 7, 2016

Netflix would love to get more traditional pay TV carriage through adding an app on set-top boxes. That, in turn, would seem to help pay TV  companies keep their model intact.

But is it too little, too late?

One of the positives of Netflix on set-top boxes would be ease-of-use for all TV viewers. Netflix could endear itself to a larger base of viewers, by adding value to pay TV and possibly slowing down the cord-cutting. 

The flip side is, many pay TV providers, particularly cable companies, feel Netflix is their main competition. Liberty Media’s John Malone, for one, believes the cable TV industry should have created something like Netflix years ago.

Mind you, cable companies used to think broadcast networks were the main competition not too many years ago. Now with TV trade groups like the VAB, they are all on the same side.

Morgan Stanley media analyst Ben Swinburne says a big shift of Netflix to set-top boxes would help Netflix out of its recent sluggish ways.

Others might argue that Netflix’s near-50-million subscribers may be a mature marketplace -- and that it already has big market/brand awareness. Netflix executives may have been more accepting of the traditional pay TV environment when the SVOD service was at, say, 10 million customers years ago. Now? Maybe less so.

Swinburne also believes a big set-top move by Netflix could help lower the older demographics of pay TV providers, steering more millennials to think about pay TV in a different way.

Others might be thinking that that train has left the station -- that Netflix itself caters to older viewers. New subscription video-on-demand services are upon us, such as FullScreen, already looking to steer younger-skewing audiences away from the likes of Netflix.

Disruption never sleeps -- even for the established media disruptors.