Millions of Subscribers Leaving Cable TV for Streaming Services

suraj.sun writes "Netflix and Hulu are convincing millions of cable, satellite and telco subscribers to cut the cord and dive into video streaming. That's the conclusion of a new report released this week by the Convergence Consulting Group, which finds that 2.65 million Americans canceled TV subscriptions between 2008-2011 in favor of lower-cost internet subscription services or video platforms. Though Convergence co-founder Brahm Eiley projects that the number of people opting out of TV subscription services will begin to slow in 2012 and 2013. Part of the problem, Eiley argues, may be the rising price tag for streaming rights to programming which could cause fiscal fits for Netflix."

Comments

Costs much?

[pecosdave]

It's cheaper to get Amazon Prime, Hulu, AND Netflix than it is to pay for cable.

Re:Costs much?

[msobkow]

I think far more important than price is the idea of a virtual VCR where you can watch what you want, when you want, with far fewer ads than "traditional" channel-based TV.

My exposure to DirecTiVO broke my TV habit. When I moved back to Canada, I shifted to torrents. But I will NOT go back to watching shows on the schedule set by some arbitrary board of assholes.

Re:Costs much?

[tirefire]

It's cheaper to get Amazon Prime, Hulu, AND Netflix than it is to pay for cable.

An excellent point. I would like to add that it is even cheaper to just wait for the show to come out on DVD. And then check it out from the local library.

On the one hand, it requires discipline and patience. On the other hand... it's just TV. I'm not rich, so I'm probably showing some kind of ironic poor-man's snobbery here, but even my favorite TV shows (Futurama, House, Mad Men, The Wire, Top Gear UK, Cowboy Bebop) still enrich my life less than a good novel/comic book/six-pack of beer. And even a terrible novel stimulates the imagination more than TV, with its effortless entertainment value, something that is only really valuable to me if I'm dead tired or staying home from work sick or something.

Paying for any TV show is just not a good deal for me. Or maybe I just don't know good television - feel free to suggest a good show I haven't heard of. But hearing about millions of subscribers leaving cable and satellite TV makes me smile. Cable/sat companies have offered little to nothing of value beyond their infrastructure for years. Enough of this 19th-century rent-seeking. I'm lukewarm about TV, and I understand that puts me in the minority, but I'm sure we can all think of things more deserving of our money.

I opted out last year

[EzInKy]

After 12 years of paying for TV, I finally cut the cord. The final straw for me were the distracting popups shown at the bottom of the screen in the middle of the shows. I mean really, think about. You are paying for the "priviledge" of being a product subjected to insistent advertising. How ridiculous is that? My average bill was around $100 month. That's over $12,000 a decade for chrissakes! What do I have to show for that expense now? Absolutely nothing!

Re:I opted out last year

[JaredOfEuropa]

I have pretty much ignored TV for the past 12 years, getting my shows and movies online. I do have a cable subscription again (it comes with my internet hookup, for a few euros extra), and recently I have started to watch some TV again; my new GF sometimes likes to veg out and channel surf a little. And I am appalled at how crap TV has become. Not because of the shows but the incessant, loud commercials. And those popups, yes. Dear god, how can anyone sit through that?

What pisses me off even more than the increased ad airtime, is the fact that shows are now designed around commercial breaks, especially the non-sitcom shows. They now show you what's to come after the break, and after the break there's a short recap of what has come before, eating into the amount of actual content even further. Then there's the timing of ads. For example, at the end of Community, Troy and Abed always do a funny little skit. You guessed it: between the show's end and the skit is a commercial break. Milking the audiences' interest in the show for all it's worth.

Funny thing about those popups: I had never seen them before until recently, but I remember sitting in at some conference where a company (I think it was Adobe) announced technology to insert them on the fly. I think I was the only real consumer at that talk, all the others were content producers or broadcast people. And I recall my horror at their enthusiasm. I asked the speaker if he really thought that people were waiting for this sort of disruption during their shows, and he assured me in no uncertain tones that yes, TV stations and advertisers would love it, and the rest of the room joined in an enthusiastic brainstorm on the possibilities. Of course I meant real people, not TV airheads and marketeers. In the whole presentation, Q&A, and subsequent discussion, the topic of us the viewers or our viewing pleasure did not come up once.

That enthusiasm leads me to believe that it's only a matter of time before Hulu and all other streaming services will start inserting ads and popups into their streams. Streaming media will simply replace cable broadcasts; what changes is the selection of content and the on-demand nature of the medium, but the ads will come back. Even if there will be a few premium channels offering ad-free content for a little extra, at some point even they might cave in to pressure or temptation. The once ad-free premium TV channels around here all have caved in long ago.

Re:Well that and if your lucky like I am

[pecosdave]

I started to write a longer top level about how refusal to support Clear QAM and forcing cables boxes on people with QAM capable TV's and forcing people to use cable company provided DVR's instead of - well Clear QAM was a major contributing factor but the comment started to get too long and lose focus.

BTW, the way the media companies are dealing with loss of viewers is the opposite of what they should do.

Look at an original Star Trek episode on Hulu, it runs about 54 minutes. Look at an original Battlestar Galactica Episode, it runs about 50 minutes, look at a modern SciFi show - it will run about 43 minutes.

I would argue an hour long reality show is 0 minutes of non-advertising content.

People are watching less TV partially because there's less TV to watch in an hour.

Re:choice and bandwidth

[MDillenbeck]

1) Doesn't it bother anyone that by having the choice of what to see and when, you simply reinforce your own interests/prejudices, rather than open your mind to new ideas? This is probably the Internet's greatest sin.

Actually, that is why I like my Netflix subscription. I watch it... a lot. I've seen almost all the things I want to see on it, and the rate of new content is slower than I would like - but I do only pay $8 a month, so I don't expect a lot. However, when it is 3 am on a sleepless night off with nothing to do (everything is closed and I don't think my neighbors would appreciate me cutting the lawn or building a shed at that hour), I will turn on Netflix and watch a show before going to bed. I find myself often going into sections I normally wouldn't, loading up something I don't think I'd normally watch, and finding out I really enjoyed it. Then I follow the suggestions based on that film until I run out of content - only to repeat the exploration again when I run out of stuff a few months down the road.

Think of it this way - its like internet browsing. I look up something on wikipedia, a blue link of an interesting word (or unknown word) gets followed, then an article link at the bottom takes me to a new web page, and so forth, until I am on a totally unrelated topic - a topic that I would have thought of looking into without that flow of links taking me there. I sort of do the same thing on Netflix as I do on my web browsing. So, no, I don't think the Internet and personal choice simply reinforces my own interest/prejudices - however, exploring one's interests is not always a bad thing. Just as I make it a point to go to new restaurants and places in my life, I also find it acceptable to go to my favorite diner or place frequently. The trick is balancing likes with new experiences.

Re:Seems about right

[Hatta]

The right thing to do is to drop the cable news entirely. Same with talk radio. They're bad for you, and bad for the country.

Re:Science Fiction

[Myopic]

Consider pirating the content. It doesn't cost anything and comes with none of those restrictions. I know, you tried to do the "right" thing, you went out of your way to try to give your money to the people who drone on and on about needing the money -- but when you did, they turned you down and said they didn't want your money. I don't know what they are thinking, but it's pretty darn clear they don't want your money, so stop trying so hard. Just go get what you want (content with no hassle) and if the authorized people ever want your money, then they'll give you what you want in exchange for it. Good luck.

Per household, not per person

[tepples]

At that rate, it's over 150 hours of streaming - or about five hours a day.

Five hours per household, not five hours per person. Reduce that for operating system updates, application and game downloads, web surfing, Farcebook, etc.