Broadband Subscribers Eclipsing Cable TV Subscribers
An anonymous reader writes: High-speed internet has become an everyday tool for most people, and cord-cutters have dramatically slowed the growth of cable TV, so this had to happen eventually: broadband internet subscribers now outnumber cable TV subscribers among the top cable providers in the U.S. According to a new report, these providers account for 49,915,000 broadband subscribers, edging out the number of cable subscribers by about 5,000. As Re/code's Peter Kafka notes, this means that for better or worse, the cable guys are now the internet guys. Kafka says their future is "selling you access to data pipes, and pay TV will be one of the things you use those pipes for."
It doesn't matter which channel you watch, all cable content is total crap these days. You have basically four choices: "sports" involving obscenely overpaid multimillionaires, ultra-liberal "documentaries", "reality" freakshows, and manic "newscasts".
At least the Internet provides content that has some value. The recent nonsense in St. Louis is a great example of this. Cable news channels have gone out of their way to make the rioters appear to be "victims", to portray the guy who got shot as some sort of an "angel", and to refuse to acknowledge that the guy who got shot had just robbed a convenience store, assaulting somebody in the process, and most likely attacked a police officer.
The Internet coverage of this incident has been far better. It doesn't just give one side of the story, but instead provides as much information as possible. Intelligent, and even unintelligent, people know that they're better off getting the full picture from the Internet than they are watching cable news and getting a sanitized version of the events.
So of course cable viewership will drop off, as people get tired of the crap that's on there, and move to the Internet where the content is better.