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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."
To quote Blizzard's management when WoW lost three million subscribers in a single quarter: "Don't worry, it's cyclical."
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How are Hulu and Netflix doing? Even better, how is HBO doing now that they've made HBO Go available without a cable subscription?
I'm currently paying for both Hulu and Netflix (and also Crunchyroll) and i'm thinking of picking up HBO Go. I have no problem paying for the content i want, it's the hassle of dealing with the cable company plus paying for a lot of crap that i don't want that's the problem.
My big gripe at the moment is SyFy. For the first time since they changed their name to something that sounds like a venereal disease they're producing content that i'm actually interested in. But i can't watch it because even though they're posting it to Hulu they're requiring that you have a cable subscription to view it. I don't know if this is stupidity on their part or some kind of legal tangle they just can't free themselves from, but i _want_ to watch their stuff and i'm willing to pay them, either directly or indirectly, but they just won't let me.
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If they spent their time keeping subscribers happier rather than cannibalizing subscribers of other types of service they wouldn't be losing so much.
The NUMBER ONE difference in cost between services comes from moving from one to another.
If my monthly bill didn't slowly creep up after a couple of years, I wouldn't be forced to move to something else. Instead of whoring out for "new bundles", just offer a lower price. 99% of the people moving service don't want to or have to because of coverage, but do because they can save $60 a month with a new "introductory" bundle somewhere else.
Also there is this strange resistance to allowing users to pick what they want to watch and pay for only that. Believe it or not, some people don't want four channels of QVC, and they'd rather pay the $8 for the weather channel (or whatever) instead of $22 for a bunch of shit along with the weather channel.
I did this for a long time. I actually ended up buying the "season passes" for shows on iTunes and "multi passes" of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. All told, i'd spend about $400 a year buying the HD versions of the shows on iTunes. The show's would be available to me the day after they aired on Cable. But I would own them, be able to watch them anytime, and they'd be commercial free. All for about half of what I was paying for cable each year.
Who'd have thought that treating your customers like scumbags and cash cows might eventually cause them to leave?
This is my surprised face.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
That's okay. I've looked at my usage and I could get away with DSL speeds or even with cellular if I absolutely had to. Plus Google Fiber will probably end up in my city within the next year or two an I'm planning on getting rid of my cable provider altogether.
Besides, if the recent FCC decision to regulate Internet providers like they regulated telephone companies to fight against the ISPs' attempts to extort fees from content providers sticks, as a common-carrier designation the cable companies might find themselves required to provide Internet access even if that's the only service the customer wants.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
We got rid of pay-TV a few years ago when we realized that most of what we watched was reruns of bad police procedurals. The straw that broke the camel's back was their taking Turner Classic Movies off of analog cable (that we had) and putting it exclusively on premium (at the time) HD. We did the math and we figured we could buy a whole season NEW on disc of a TV series for the cost of one month of cable. Used, two or three seasons easily.
Not even accounting for the advantages of streaming it's still a good deal to get rid of cable TV unless you watch live TV like sports and need a live source that's otherwise unavailable.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
We dropped Comcast and deployed Leaf antennas. We get a couple of dozen channels, including the four major networks and a number of sub-channels rented by movie and rerun networks (e.g., Cozi, Movies!, MeTV, Buzzr, Laff, Decades, Retro, Bounce, Escape, Grit, Get, etc.). If there's nothing on, or the reception is being interrupted by who-knows-what, we turn off the TV and do something else. Every month we enjoy not paying Comcast.
Maybe they should do what we the customer's have been begging them to do for years!
Its simple its called à la carte. It means you sell us the channels we actually effing want! we don't care if you say the extra 30 home shopping channels are free we don't want them!
And maybe you could do something about the %50 advertising %50 show problem. I don't know how I ever put up with it now after using netflix for over a year.
No I don't care how much it costs for you to do this. You are either going to do this or you are going to be left behind kind of like att is with their landline POTS service.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
As someone who literally hasn't had a TV (in the traditional sense) in their house for 20 years, I'm always shocked at the sheer amount of advertising whenever I'm on business travel and the hotel internet isn't fast enough for netflix. Even if it's a show I'm intensely interested in, I'd much rather wait for it to come out on DVD or arrive on netflix than suffer through all the advertising. A bit at the top and bottom of each hour, sure, but ~5 minutes of commercials every ~5 minutes? How do "normal" people stand for that?
Given that I can only watch the stream of Cable TV for as long as I subscribe to cable, I would say that I own them much more so than the product I got from Cable TV. If I decide to stop buying new shows, I can still go back and rewatch the old ones as many times as I want. If I stop paying for cable I can't watch anything.
Sure the authentication server could go down permanently, but at this point i've already watched and rewatched most of the shows multiple times over the last 5 years i've been doing this. I've also spent half as much doing this as I would've spent on cable. And I haven't had to deal with commercials.
So far, I also don't see the sun setting on the iTunes store any time in the foreseeable future. If it did, however, I would expect to see a MUCH bigger outcry over the "purchases" people have done on iTunes disappearing. To the extent that it would actually bring the topic up to mainstream news and actually spark some debate and possible change to the laws about what is required to ensure that you can continue to enjoy your purchases in perpetuity. I would also expect people to work much more diligently about then cracking the iTunes DRM.
Sure the satellite companies suffer when customers quit. They don't sell much in the way of internet to replace those lost TV customers. But cable, now that's another story. Cable actually charges me more for broadband since I do not carry TV package too. In fact my next door neighbor just cancelled Comcast and went to a DSL provider just for the fact she wanted internet only broadband and Comcast told her she had to buy a basic channel package too. I pay for broadband only and have for years! The thing is, Comcast still makes money off broadband and in fact all Comcast really should care about is providing the services they offer. Together as packages or separate. But someone at Comcast is worried your using your broadband to buy other media services and that bugs Comcast.
Well that's too bad, and in fact many people in my area are ditching Comcast completely. I think I could get by with a DSL line providing a good 6mbps download speed. Not the greatest, but $29 vs $68 per month sounds pretty good.
...too expensive. People are voting with their wallets. Time for the time honored appropriate response to a shift in the demand curve where the amount demanded at every price is less: time for price cuts.
Everybody in the industry has gotten fat: producers, actors, athletes, sports leagues, coaches, college athletic programs, on air talent, etc. (I'm mostly interested in ESPN, I almost never watch anything on HBO etc, but the same logic applies). You can't pay billions to televise a single college football conference, raise your prices to astronomical levels to cover same and expect your customers to keep shelling out.
There will be a blood bath, especially in the college sports world. The days of $5mm/year coaches, $1mm/year AD's and $750mm stadiums with lavish locker rooms, indoor training facilities, etc, are going to quickly come to an end.
The NFL will feel the pinch as well.
You've fallen into the trap. The real struggle should be corporate control of the country versus control by the people, but the corporations have convinced too many people that there's a left vs right fight going on, or a liberal versus conservative struggle. It is distracting you from the real enemy. If you think Disney or Comcast are "liberal" then you have drunk their lemonade. Corporations are not political, they are instead impersonal hive minds. They follow the winds of change without any loyalty to any political brand except for money. American has been deluded into thinking that if they're anti-abortion that they must always be anti-tax at the same time, and if they're pro-gay-rights that they must automatically be pro-union. It's stupid, there area million different political stances that any voter could have and yet we're being fooled into thinking that there are only two: us versus them.
Don't hate Disney because they have different political views than your tribe has, but hate them because they're replacing "we the people" with "we the stockholders".
We must have different cable companies.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Typically we now see 20 minutes of ads for every 40 minutes of program. So, 1/3 of the time is commercials. Since commercials suck, It's little wonder that cable TV is shrinking its customer base. You can get the same crap, with fewer channels, over the air with the same 20 minutes of commercials per hour, and plenty of digital sub-channels showing old programs. Why not cut the cord when the cord keeps getting more expensive and the quality is not any better?
PC sales are a lot stronger than the console people would like to admit. Roughly about as strong as any of the consoles... and that is just counting console ports.
There was some interesting sales information that showed the xbox one was having a very hard time... the PS4 is doing pretty good... and the PC is generally identical to the PS4 merely accounting for ports. If you include all the things that are on PC and not the console, the PC game market dwarfs the PS4... and likely the entire console market collectively.
Not a fan of the business model. It would be better if all this crap were on the PC. Here someone will say something like "but I like to play on the couch"... then get a gaming laptop and plug it into your tv when you want to do that. You can plug game pads into a PC as easily as anything. And you have a great deal more freedom about it than you do on the console.
Here someone will say "but gaming PCs are expensive"... if you take the consoles as the benchmark of what constitutes acceptable graphics, you can throw together a gaming PC for about 400 dollars. What is more, the cost of a gaming PC is not the cost of the entire machine. Because you're going to have a PC regardless. Who has a console but doesn't have a PC at all? That's rare. So the cost of the gaming PC is not the cost of the machine but rather the cost of turning the PC you're going to buy anyway into a gaming PC. Which means your costs drop to perhaps 100 to 200 dollars if your goal is merely to keep pace with the consoles. if you want to go beyond that you have that flexibility which is not something the console people can say.
Then you'll hear someone say "but PCs are hard"... well... ten year olds can figure it out. So I don't know what to tell you.
And then you'll hear "but none of the exclusive games I want are on the PC"... well, you're a victim of advertising because name the genre and there is probably lots of PC games that are every bit as good if not better. They're just not promoted on the super bowl like that last xbox crap game was... you know the one that had tyrion lannister narrating for it for no reason. And as I remember most people realized it was over hyped, over priced, garbage. The PC also has a lot of games that you're just not going to find on the console. MMOs if you like that. RTS games if you like that. RPGs are quite a big stronger on the PC. The PC has legacy support back to DOS... so backward compatibility to the beginning of time. You can also install emulators that let you play pretty much everything. Sadly emulators for more modern consoles are absent for some reason. I blame ninja death squads from MS and Sony for that. Its sort of inexplicable otherwise.
Anywho... yeah... exclusive content is bullshit and rather than compel me to buy service Y, it just makes me ignore content X.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
If cable wants my bucks they better put out more and better at a vastly reduced rate. They charge too much and provide too little and charge a fortune. On the other hand Net Flix gives quite a bit and some of it is great entertainment and they hardly charge at all. My cable costs me $226. a month. I do get numerous services but still it is only worth about $50. a month in my opinion.
telcos and cable companies, fuck them both
replace them with state owned equipment, that private companies lease fractionally to provide services
genuine capitalist competition, rather than oligarchic corruption
as with many issues today, there is a problem in what people identify as the market in question, and what needs to be regulated for the market to work
where there is a natural monopoly: the cables in the ground, the state owns that. who pays for it? any company that wants to fractionally lease the cables, to provide services someone might want to pay for
similar to how the state currently leases radio spectrum to broadcasters and cell phone companies
yay capitalism: only possible with good regulation
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In my state, we've been forced to buy auto liability insurance since, well...forever.
I don't buy car liability insurance. Here's why not.
I moved two months ago and learned I had an option between AT&T Uverse and Charter Digital. AT&T was 25Mbps for $50 a month with a free phone number and I didn't have to buy television services if I didn't want them. Charter was (reportedly) 600 Mbps (right...), forced you to include phone and TV, and cost well over $100 a month. Both companies wanted install fees nearly $100. Both companies report you to the copyright cartels if you torrent shit.
I went with AT&T. Why? I know from experience that a decent real-time speed necessary for acceptable HD streaming is between 3 and 6 Mbps (depends on format, encoding, etc.). So even the slower of the two was five times what I needed. I don't plan on torrenting terabytes of files, though I do want to be able to download a few favorite shows now that I don't have a cable box and a tuner. AT&T costs me half as much, even counting the $50 a year for VPN.
Also, I HATE Charter with a passion. They've been a dick of a company ever since I've patronized them, starting 25 years ago. They'll cut you off if you're late paying for service in advance -- that's right, their bill says you're paying for service in the upcoming month. But if you're a week late, they cut you off and charge to reconnect. And after multiple instances of that, they'll cut you off the day after the due date. (These experiences are decades old and three addresses ago, but true ones.) To this day, they have constant outages during business hours, are assholes on the phone, and their equipment quality is crap. Not to mention the conflicts of interest that exist between content providers and cable companies, and the accusations of bandwidth throttling (not specifically against Charter... yet).
While AT&T are no angels, they're at worst the equivalent of a lumbering corporate behemoth from the users' perspective. And I was impressed by the tech who came out to install my service. He found an unexpected problem, and I immediately thought oh no, I'm not getting internet today but the guy actually busted his ass to get the job done. (He had to run back and forth two blocks to test each end of 25 pairs of wires to find the right pair at the fiber transciever. What should have been a 30 minute job turned into a 2.5 hour one that involved a lot of sweating.) My first bill payment was three weeks late (I had to travel on business and forgot) and I didn't even hear a peep out of them. The next bill had a $5 late payment charge. And the charges are for the past month's services. And the reliability of the service has been excellent... Netflix, Hulu and Amazon all stream fantastically, with better quality than I had using Charter at my previous residence (admittedly, a sorta remote one), and always instant play. Even porn streaming sites are better. (Yea, you betcha that's one of the first thing I tried...)
TL;DR: I cut the cable, dumped the least favorite corporation I was forced to patronize, and I am SO HAPPY. The only programming I can't get are daily game shows (I'm a Jeopardy addict) and sporting events (meh... I'll go to a bar if I need to watch a game, which is seldom).
I can see the fnords!
Now that Jon Stewart is gone cable TV can go pound sand.
In my state, we've been forced to buy auto liability insurance since, well...forever.
But *only* if you own a car and want to drive it on public roads. For health insurance, you are required to ether give money to corporations or pay a large tax just for breathing. That's a big difference.
Technically the tax isn't for everyday breathing, the tax is meant keep you breathing, and as a society we've chosen to keep people breathing even if they can't pay for it.
Find a way to opt out of guaranteed emergency healthcare, then you can opt out of paying for it. But it's unfair to say "I don't need no stinking health insurance!" knowing full well that if you are in a serious accident or contract an expensive disease that no one is going to let you die because you can't pay for it.
What? The performance is covered by a copyright and I'll get DMCAed? Fuck.
Here is NOT a performance of a cat playing the world's smallest violin for the cable companies.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Hmm, you haven't noticed the corrosive right in the country which despises anyone who doesn't share their opinions?
Who cares? The lack of spectator sports on Netflix is a feature, not a bug.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
How do you design your broadcast and delivery systems to continue to support legacy hardware in a sustainable manner without [rolling] trucks
Self-install kits. Comcast used this a couple years ago when it switched its expanded basic SD service from analog to "Digital Transport Adapters" (the small decoder boxes) so that it could compress all channels to make more room for DOCSIS channels to deliver "Blast" Internet. Give a few months of notice that service on the old protocol will be going away, ship boxes that can handle both the old and new protocols, transition the higher tier channels first so that you at least have their revenue if you absolutely have to roll trucks, and then transition the rest of the channels.
I buy enough for 25 people and that is just for weekend use.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
People may be cutting the cord, but they are still paying for TV. Now they are just paying Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and Sling, instead of Comcast, Time Warner, and Charter. Oh, wait, they still are paying Comcast, Time Warner, and Charter for the Internet service so they can also pay for streaming services. I'm not sure the total bill will be going down much.
If you choose to own and operate a motor vehicle, there are certain laws you have to follow, including carrying enough insurance to cover the damage you may do to someone should you make a mistake. But you do have a choice in the matter, because you don't have to own and operate a motor vehicle. If you walk, ride a bike, take mass transit, ride with uber, etc, you are not forced to buy any products... you had to opt in to that set of laws by choosing to buy and drive a car.
The huge difference here, the thing that is truly unprecedented, is that every living American is now forced to buy a product. There's no opt out. There's no choice. If you breathe, you must buy. This is oppressive, this is different, and it only has happened under a Democrat, Obama. If you want to go live off the grid on a homestead somewhere and be a subsistence farmer living and dying in your own when your time comes, tough beans for you. If you want to be an Amish person, live in your community and not make use of any modern medicine, tough beans for you. If you don't want to pay for modern insurance just because you want to take your chances and save some money (which I think is stupid, but freedom should allow people to do it), then tough beans for you. Obama still makes you buy his product.
This is yet another example proving that Liberals and liberty have nothing in common.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Besides - consumers today change over from watching TV at decided times to use Video on Demand like Netflix and YouTube.
In many cases they can at the same time avoid the annoying ads injected into the TV programs that are on broadcast. On the web - well, there you have adblock to clean up the crap.
We are in the middle of a media transition phase where people changes their habits to do cherry picking and only pay for what they want to see.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Way to totally ignore the fact that there is a corrosive Left in this country which DESPISES anyone who doesn't share their opinions
I'm curious. Do you have examples of people or instances, or it is just a general vibe you get from people?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
"sports fee" of $6 per month, No sports channels...don't do sports on tv $72 per year ? SNIP
Techdirt seems to have some numbers in answer to my post:
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
For instance:
"...ESPN has lost 7.2 million viewers in the last four years, and a little more than three million in the last year. Since ESPN is annoyingly force-bundled with most basic cable subscriptions a lot of these users are cord cutters."
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
It has nothing to do with "liberal" or "conservative". It's that they're all family. They all share the last name, "Inc.".
Seriously, what idiot thinks corporations give a crap about liberal or conservative? If anyone was paying attention to the Republican debate, Donald Trump (of all people) broke it down for them. He gives money to everyone. He explained, on national TV, that he buys politicians as a matter of course. Left, right and center they take his money and are available when he needs something. And people still think I'm extreme when I say that this country is an oligarchy.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
He said the same thing you did, and his comment is a "jeer?" Wow.....
I'm easily to the left of Jeremiah Wright, but I certainly don't harbor the bitter venom he has for the US.
As for leftist views, Individual liberty exists as long as individuals are equal. Once one group amasses more power, they tend to overrule the weaker side. I'm not sure if that makes me a leftist or a libertarian though. But Atheist and against the death penalty probably makes me more aligned with the Left than the Christian Right or Neo-Conservatives.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire