Not long ago, subscription growth was a solved problem. If a company had a decent product, enough marketing budget, and a working funnel, growth often followed. It was not elegant, but it was predictable. Spend more, acquire more, repeat. That logic powered everything from streaming platforms to productivity software and the first wave of consumer AI tools.
But that formula is now breaking down. Customer acquisition costs have climbed across digital channels, while privacy changes have reduced the signals advertisers once depended on. Expanding into new markets has also become harder and less predictable. Even companies with strong brands are finding that adding the next million subscribers takes more time, more money and more effort than the last.
As those pressures build, some subscription businesses are rethinking where growth actually comes from. Instead of pushing harder on ads and direct sign-ups, attention is shifting toward something less visible but increasingly important: Distribution systems built on telco-led bundling and billing relationships people already trust, with AI helping to coordinate the operational scale that once made those systems too complex to manage globally.
Bundling Subscriptions
The signs of strain are clear. In Deloitte’s 2025 Digital Media Trends survey, many consumers reported “subscription fatigue” and frustration managing multiple paid services as costs rise. That fatigue shows up in churn. One recent report found that 74 percent of U.S. cord-cutters canceled a streaming subscription in the past year, often because of rising prices or cheaper alternatives.
What’s changing is how companies respond. Bundles are no longer being treated as primarily as short-term promotions or retention tactics. Increasingly, they are being used as a way to enter markets and reach customers through billing relationships that already exist.
Bundling is not new. Cable and telecom operators have packaged services for decades. But what’s different now is scale. Omdia forecasts that operator and telco bundles will account for about 25 percent of global online video subscriptions by 2029, up from roughly one-fifth today.
For companies focused on distribution, bundling is becoming a way to work around structural limits in how subscriptions scale globally. In many international markets, direct-to-consumer pricing does not travel well. Services that are based on U.S. or European price points often struggle to localize pricing without undercutting global plans or creating arbitrage problems. Lower prices may boost adoption in emerging markets, but they can also weaken perceived value elsewhere.
Bundling, therefore, offers an alternative. By embedding subscriptions inside local telecom plans or service packages, companies can reach price-sensitive markets without publicly resetting standalone prices. The customer sees an offer that fits local purchasing power, while the subscription provider preserves its global pricing structure.
“For a long time, growth depended on how efficiently companies could acquire users through direct channels,” said Anthony Goonetilleke, group president of technology and head of strategy at Amdocs. “That model starts to break down when pricing, churn and global expansion all collide at once; which is why distribution has to operate as a system, not as one-off deals.”
What AI Changes About Bundling
The complexity Goonetilleke describes is exactly where AI enters the picture. Managing subscription bundles across dozens of countries — each with different telecom partners, regulatory requirements, and pricing structures — used to require dedicated operations teams for each region. Expansion happened slowly, often taking months to configure billing integrations, set up entitlements, and ensure compliance with local rules.
AI is now shortening those timeframes. Modern systems can now analyze regulatory frameworks across markets, automatically configure compliant workflows and adapt when requirements change. When a telecom partner in Southeast Asia wants to bundle multiple streaming services with different access tiers, AI can map the entitlements, set pricing guardrails, and configure billing — work that previously meant building custom integrations from scratch.
What makes this different from earlier automation is adaptability. Older systems worked from rigid templates and failed when markets introduced exceptions. AI-driven platforms can handle more variations without manual reconfiguration, making it viable to manage hundreds of partner relationships simultaneously rather than a handful.
Telco Distribution As A Growth Channel
This has pushed companies to rethink how distribution itself is managed. Rather than treating telco partnerships, billing integrations, and market launches as one-off projects, some are trying to handle bundling as an ongoing system that works across regions.
MarketONE, built by Amdocs, is one example of how companies are trying to systematize that work. Instead of focusing only on payments, the platform is designed to help subscription services manage the practical work of bundling at scale, from onboarding and entitlements to billing and performance tracking, without rebuilding those processes market by market. The idea, really, is to make telco-led distribution repeatable rather than limited to bespoke deals in a handful of countries.
“MarketONE reimagines how digital subscriptions are brought to market, shifting bundling from custom work to platform economics,” Goonetilleke said. “One integration creates consistency across markets, so providers don’t rebuild onboarding, entitlement, billing or analytics every time they expand to a new partner or geography. For providers, it enables simple global scale, lowering costs and creating new revenue streams.”
That approach draws on Amdocs’ long-standing telecom infrastructure, which already operates inside the billing and operational systems many operators rely on. For subscription providers, that matters because it reduces the need to build parallel systems for each region.
AI handles much of the operational coordination — monitoring performance across partners, flagging compliance issues before they escalate and optimizing bundle configurations based on regional adoption patterns. It doesn’t eliminate the underlying complexity of multi-market distribution, but it removes the manual bottlenecks that previously made scale impractical.
Beyond The Funnel
For subscription companies, the implications are wide-ranging. Traditional direct-to-consumer growth demands constant spending on ads and funnel optimization. Bundled distribution reduces reliance on paid channels by tapping existing relationships and familiar billing flows. When a subscription appears on a regular bill, sign-up friction tends to fall and cancellation resistance tends to rise.
The impact is not just about convenience. Telecom operators already manage long-term billing relationships that often last years. When subscriptions are layered into those accounts, they inherit some of that durability.
That changes churn dynamics. A service tied to an ongoing plan behaves differently than one purchased in isolation, even if the underlying product is the same. As Goonetilleke put it, “When subscriptions sit inside long‑standing billing relationships, retention stops being about individual features and starts being about the system that supports them,” adding that “You get consistency because the underlying platform carries the relationship across markets.”
Not Without Tradeoffs
None of this makes direct channels like app stores, owned websites, or in-product sign-ups obsolete. First-party relationships remain critical for brand control, customer insight and high-value users. Bundling won’t function the same way in every category, and it won’t replace app stores or owned sign-ups where direct interaction is important.
There are also real costs. Sharing revenue with distribution partners lowers margins per subscriber. Managing several partners across regions is more difficult, especially when local regulations differ. AI can help coordinate parts of that work, but it does not eliminate it. Distribution still has to be designed, governed and maintained.
Goonetilleke is clear about AI’s limits in this context.
“AI doesn’t replace the underlying relationships or infrastructure,” he said. “What it does is make distribution manageable at scale, especially when you’re dealing with different markets, partners, and rules.”
What Comes Next
The subscription economy is still growing, but the mechanics that once powered that growth are losing effectiveness. Spending more on ads no longer guarantees results, and expanding into new markets introduces pricing and operational constraints that funnels alone cannot solve.
What is emerging instead is a focus on distribution design. Growth is becoming less about optimizing campaigns and more about how subscriptions move through markets, pricing systems and long-term customer relationships. In that context, bundling is not a promotion but a form of infrastructure.
AI matters here not because it replaces sales or marketing, but because it makes distribution design manageable at scale. The companies that win the next phase of subscription growth will not be the ones with the smartest funnels. They will be the ones that understand how subscriptions move through real-world systems — billing, pricing, markets and long-term customer relationships — and use AI to make those systems work together.
