Continued Cord Cutting Hits the Pay TV Business Hard

An anonymous reader writes: Cord cutting is not a new concern for the pay TV business but a recent massive sell-off in media stocks has many in the industry worried. Cable, satellite and TV companies suffered their worst-ever quarterly subscriber declines losing more than half a million accounts, sending stocks tumbling. Researchers say this may be the beginning of the end for the pay TV business. According to analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson: "A year ago, the Pay TV sector was shrinking at an annual rate of 0.1 percent. A year later, the rate at which the Pay TV sector is declining has quickened to 0.7 percent year-over-year. That may not seem like a mass exodus, but it is a big change in a short period of time. And the rate of decline is still accelerating."

Comments

Re:Expect the Republicans to stop this...

[Crazy Taco]

It's f*cking amazing that a site full of IT geeks can't understand separation of powers or a default rule of deny all.

That's an excellent point. You would think the 10th amendment would make it clear (as if it isn't already clear just from reading the main document) that the constitution is a whitelist of the few things the federal government MAY do, not a blacklist of the few things it can't. IT geeks ought to be able to tell the difference between a whitelist and a blacklist, but apparently not.

The 10th amendment says: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

There it is folks, they just declared a whitelist. If it isn't explicitly delegated to the federal government by the constitution, then the feds can't do it. I wish we could build a nice, special legislative firewall through which all congressional laws must flow, with the Constitution serving as the ACL. The congressional record would probably look like the logs on a primary Internet firewall: 10 million spurious packets (or outright attacks, because yes, some of these laws are attacks on our rights) blocked for every legitimate packet that gets through.