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Viewers Only Watch 10% of Pay-TV Channels: Nielsen (usatoday.com)
Chances are if you have cable, satellite or telco-delivered TV service, you aren't watching all the channels in your package. Heck, you probably aren't even watching half of the channels you pay for. Global information and measurement company Nielsen has conducted some research and found that viewers are actually watching, on average, only about 20 of the 200 channels they pay for. What this means is that a majority of us watch less than 10% of the channels we pay our cable, satellite or other provider for. USA Today reports: Back in May 2014, viewers watched 10.6% of the 197 channels they said they paid for, Nielsen's TV Audience Report found. A year later, viewers watched 9.6% of the 208 channels they got. This year, viewers also watched 9.6% of the 206 channels on their pay-TV service. That doesn't mean customers are unhappy with their service. "There is a jump between 'I'm not watching all the channels I pay for' to 'I'm not going to pay for more channels than I watch,'" says Glenn Enoch, senior vice president of audience insights for Nielsen. "What we do know is that people who have skinny bundles are lower-income than the average, so this is more about household income than viewing behavior." Pay-TV companies need to experiment, for sure, because other consumer behaviors in the Nielsen report suggest traditional TV viewing by those under 35 continues to fall, says Colin Dixon, analyst and founder of nScreenMedia.
Given that they force you to buy 8 channels of dreck just to get the one channel you want, it's not surprising. One of the many reasons why I cut the cord.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Meanwhile, I watch about 97% of what I download. Plus shows from Netflix and Amazon.
Now that there are apps for most things like HBO or Starz, I really enjoy stations a lot more - I can pick up a station" as I wish, or drop it when I won't need it for a while.
In any one month I probably pay more than I would with a bundle but then again in some months I hardly subscribe to anything. So I'm probably still ahead and I'm no longer subsidizing channels I find utterly worthless. I'd much rather I spend a little more but all of it goes to the channel I like.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If it wasn't for my wife wanting to watch The Bachelor the second it comes on I would have cut the cable a long time ago. I literally watch 3 channels and most nights not even that.
I really can't stomach whats on TV these days. I know I'm older and my tastes have changed but what I see on TV these days is just uninteresting, overly political correct and frankly the actors seem to really suck. On the other hand when I see stuff from 20 years ago the same can be said, but at least then it was cheap.
Netflix is really no better either. The choices are slim, the shows are mostly junk and the prices will eventually climb to the same as cable, and/or add advertisements. It is bound to happen.
As long as you have a competitive market, trade out as soon as introductory specials fade into the sunset, for newer, sweeter deals with the competition.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
In other breaking news, the sky is blue.
Meanwhile, I only tend to visit about 20 of the 1 billion sites on the World Wide Web (about 0.000002%), and yet here I am paying full price for my Internet access.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Trump, is that you?
Marty McFly, Jr.: [to the TV] Art off. OK, I want channels 18, 24, 63, 109, 87 and the weather channel.
I watch 100% of everything I pay for.
Like Drumpf and his multiple frauds and rapes?
Prove it.
Like:
Nixon
Scotter Libby.
Spiro Agnew.
Oliver North (well his secretary went to jail)
Just Stat on Fox and Blaze.
Trump may start is own channel, Just for You.
Back In my day people where innocent until proven Guilty.
Right, wonder what your back in the days were... Decades of gangs, prohibition, mafia, corrupt jails, corrupt police departments, insider trading, corporate fraud, war on drugs, welfare fraud, Medicare fraud, Ponzie schemes, housing bubble, stock bubble, too big to fail, etc.
Most of the criminals involved there weren't even touched. Some were even bailed out by taxpayer funds. Or did you mean before 50 years ago... When entire sections of our society were treated less equally?
In Canada we have what is called CanCon which is a legally mandated level of Canadian Content. What this translates to is a huge amount of stuff that represents groups far beyond their proportions. So an entire native channel, more French channels than I can count in French, and yards and yards of stuff made in Toronto that is then rammed into our eyeballs.
I say in Canada it "was" far worse because one of the huge drivers of people to things like Netflix is to get away from this government mandated shit. Now I watch what I want to watch, when I want to watch it, and I don't feel that I have some crap made for a tiny group using vast quantities of my money.
Every now and then there are murmurings about forcing Netflix to buy CanCon, good luck with that. Also the beauty of any such crap on Netflix is that it gets a one star rating and will never show up on my screen.
But after a lifetime of being told by Ottawa that I have to watch crap made in Toronto I will never go back. If pretty boy and his mandarins did succeed in forcing Can Con onto the internet, I would go back to torrents. I will never take their shit again.
So if people in the US only watch 10% people in Canada probably watch 5.
You think that's low? Less than 10 people actually RTFA!
I have two cable boxes... Haven't been turned on since they were installed 3 years ago. I had to bundle them with my internet to get the best deal from the provider. And they stop calling you as often to "save me money with the bundle of the month". Now I just get the useless VoIP calls once every 6 months.
I don't have the time nor inclination to plan my weekly schedule around the times of the shows. I haven't really watched traditional TV in close to 15 years! 10 years ago I even lost the need to have something random in the background.
I still watch shows about 3-4 hours a week. But on my schedule. I think Hulu was a great detox program. Initially they provided the latest and greatest. Then they went to 1 day delay. Then 8 days. Then 30! A few months after that, I didn't mind watching shows an entire season later or even dropping them.
Season clif hangers were no more so wasn't addicted to looking at release schedules. The whole water cooler talk had long since died so there was rarely a need to stay up to date on whatever was on.
Now Hulu became paid only... in between seasons!! So awesome! Haven't even been to the site in months. I am probably bringing the average down, but I think Nielsen is being conservative in their numbers. It probably way worse based on how many just have the TV on and how many only got it due to bundles.
...no matter who you are. Eventually our kids will wonder why we used to sit around watching a central TV, just like we wondered why our parents sat around listening to the radio.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
I travel a couple times a year, when I do I get a hotel that has HBO. I don't look for it, the hotels in my price range always have it. What I learn when I rent a hotel room with HBO is I really don't need HBO at home, it just shows the same crap over and over and rarely shows new stuff I might want to see.
I remember some 10 years ago, dad was in a hospital in OK with heart issues, mom was with relatives close by, and nothing was happening. Sis and I drove from San Diego to Tulsa OK, staying in hotels with HBO, when the Sopranos were going strong. I was getting the DVDs for past seasons from the library, sis hadn't seen any of them so she didn't care when I went from HBO to Movie of the Week.
Same goes for Showtime. My cable company charges me $180/month for cable, I call them once a year to bitch. They typically throw in Showtime/Skinemax and drop the price to $100. Showtime/Skinemax is nowhere near worth an extra $80/month, most of it I can get from the library a few month later for free.
Before the digital TV switchover, I got all the New York City television stations. After that, just a few, plus a bunch of entertaining foreign language stations I never knew existed, but don't care to watch. If you're not very close to a big city, over-the-air is not an option.
No different than playing 30 of your 300 steam games
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Most painfully obvious research done since the "Is Water Wet" project at BJU back in the mid 2000's.
When companies like ESPN will only give you the option of EVERY ONE OF OUR CHANNELS or none, you have no choice.
The choice isn't even made for you (at least in the US). You get your cable rate jacked up by your provider so they can afford the bi-annual contract rate hikes ESPN/CNN/FOX demands. Once again, while they only offer the 'all or none' options to your provider.
They reason that since they have 8 channels (but say only 2 that get steady viewers), they can ask for the full d-list channel price for the the other 6 (that none of the profit goes back into... you know, to make a better product. lol, we show reels of what was considered public events) while demanding a premium rate for the 2 with viewers (where any reinvestment goes to, if there is any.
Ordering channels a-la-carte is so "free market"/"rahrahcapitalismrahrah", I'm surprised more of the dumbasses here don't jump all over it. I'd be fine with it.
Also, X-Files was a stupid, STUPID, show.
You're predicting Trump will win, after running an illegal foundation whose donations Trump spent on his own business affairs?
Oh, but that's different. That was not mentioned 10,000 times by Fox News and Breitbart.
Back in my day, judges and juries decided who commited a crime, not Fox News.
Every other study I've seen about TV viewership points to the average viewer's interests encompass a limited number of channels, about a dozen. Stuffing more channels into a bundle doesn't make people watch more of them.
The business model of cable is mainly based on high viewership channels subsidizing low viewership channels. They need bundling to support all the new dreck that gets made and old stuff that's re-run.
So what jury got to decide if Clinton was guilty?
Netflix does have a few good shows.
As does StarZ.
From Dusk till Dawn, Ash vs the Evil Dead, and Blunt Talk all strike me as quality entertainment. One of the cornerstones of this is the actors feel authentic and none of the characters are 'perfect', they are all damaged human beings with various quirks from mild to wild.
I do agree however that even more shovelware is coming out nowadays than used to, and not enough people are taking advantage of the benefits of the internet to self publish material that would cater to a wider paying audience.
He's already apologized for his remarks on the bus, and anyway the women involved haven't complained.
Make America Great Again!
You only have 24 hours a day, even with 100 channels you cannot watch all of them!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
You can't prove he raped anyone. Being mentioned in the Panama Papers is not proof of tax evasion, and using Charity funds to donate to Charity? What does it matter the motive, the money still went to Charity. His perfume and casino business is his business and his Univerisity was a huge sucess that educated a lot of people. They even claimed he violated the Cuba Sanctions, he didn't open that casino and he has already said he didn't pay the bills for that trip. Can you prove he paid the bills?
TV is so biased against Trump. Haters gotta hate!
Make America Great Again!
What do we need all those other channels for?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I have a 1 meter motorised dish which can be pointed at over dozen satellites, thousands of channels and I still only watch a similar number of channels.
Disclosure: I haven't owned a tv in 14 years.
When I was at my parents house, I setup their new TV and cable system. Then I blocked all of the infomercial/sales channels, and all of the Spanish channels. They lost about half of their channels.
I have a travel pass for the local transport. It entitles me to spend 18 hours on the light rail service every single day. I only use it for 1 of those hours. I book a hotel room. I can be there all day but I only want to use it at night.
Cable TV is a service just like the others. They don't have to buy some channels and then sell them to you at a profit. They negotiate a cost - for most of these channels it's a pretty paltry cost - and then offer bundles. It won't save them any money not to offer you the channels unless they offer nobody the channels.
If they had a package with just the channels you watch it would cost... EXACTLY THE SAME! Because you have shown that you are willing to pay that much for those specific channels.
i go for weeks without turning on a television, i look at the local weather on the internet and if a thunderstorm is going to move through my area i will shut off my PCs and turn on the TV to the local news channel, and sometimes but not often i will look at a TV listing for old movies and if i see something i like such as a classic old movie i might watch it, but other than that i dont watch TV, the advertising on TV is far too annoying and it just kills the enjoyment and has turned TV in to a Video Spam box.
Bill Maher (of the HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher) had a great monologue about how regardless of how this election goes, Donald Trump will likely be the last major candidate born in the 40s, with formative years and values stuck in the 50s. When he says make America great again, he's talking about making it like the 50s again.
Which was great, if you were a straight white male.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Obama is 55 and frankly I don't think his policies have really demonstrated a significant generational transformation. Despite the ideological sameness, Hillary may end up being a slight step backwards in terms of generational values, having been born in '47. Despite her liberal credentials, she too internalized a lot of 1950s values, and worse, the 1950s morals imposed on women.
I'd like to believe her "1960s" years and a self-awareness to overcome an upper-middle-class upbringing in that era, but I'm skeptical people really are able to transcend the programming of those early years. Plus I think people grow more conservative in many ways as they age, and 68 year olds are generally pretty set in their ways.
I don't think we'll really feel the post-boomer generational shift until maybe the mid-2020s when Gen-Xers are in their late 50s and have largely replaced boomers in the higher levels of leadership.
Why do you think cable companies don;t allow al a carte channel selection? Most of these networks wouldn't exist without the cable forcing them on you.
Judges and juries can't do anything when prosecutors refuse to bring charges against Hillary even after the FBI director essentially indicts her without actually indicting her.
No intent, pfft.
No but it is mentioned by the Democrat outlets over and over again. ( CNN )
The best thing AT&T could do for me is to allow me to re-organize my channels, or block them out entirely. Flipping past 50 channels selling the shark, copper pan, and ninja blender and 10 channels broadcast in languages I don't speak; to get from one channel with actual content to another is a pain in the @##.
As I recall, cable subscription stagnated about 20 years ago, so they asked what was causing customer turn-over: Way back then, unwanted channels was the main issue for subscribers.
It's why I dropped cable TV several years ago. My wife and I both felt we were paying for channels we never watched. Satellite was a scam too, you always required a better package to get the few channels you wanted. The technology has been there for years in which the cable companies and satellite providers could offer packages where the customer only get's the channels they want. Of course it is much more profitable to sell you expensive packages with a lot of stuff you don't want. We went with a antenna for local content and the rest comes from Netflix, Amazon, Roku and other web sources. The question is, will cable companies ever realize its better to provide customers what they want and keep them. Or let the bleeding of customers continue.
Why do you think none of us want to pay for goddamn cable? Because you pay out the ass for these "packages" when all we want to do is watch a select set of channels! We've been saying this for years, decades even, "Why can't we just purchase the channels we want to watch and not have all of this damn fluff that we don't?"
Oh wait, I know why. Because money (obviously). Whatever, cable isn't out biggest problem here. But, still, come on. We all knew the cable industry is just a way for someone else to take advantage of us by taking more money out of our pockets.
Maybe this 'they' of which you speak committed no crimes, as determined by people who know way more about these things than the average angry mob.
Pink Floyd already complained about it when there were only 16 channels.
...a group of my neighbors would decide who committed a crime, and we would punish accordingly. None of this "court" nonsense.
But for some reason I can't pick up HBO.
Did she have classified state secrets in her email too?
If so, go ahead and get the Grand Jury to indict her too. Oh, wait...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
And yet not a single judge, or any jury anywhere has had a say on Clinton's email containing classified information illegally.
Back in my day, ex-Presidents didn't meet with sitting attorneys general and make backroom deals on airport runways to bottle up the entire Department of Justice.
Not everyone. I couldnt think of any person less qualified to potentially be President than Palin, due to ethical and legal issues and just plain dumbness. Hillary is not dumb, but her ethical and legal problems are as bad and she's also someone who should not be President.
I'm not sure what its like in the US,but here in Canada if you get 200 channels you're getting about 60 channels, 30 of which are repeated multiple of times (~5) for different cities. Obviously if you watch CBC Toronto, you're unlikely to watch CBC Ottawa. This would explain this "finding" immediately.
Back in my day, judges and juries decided who commited a crime, not Fox News.
Back in my day, prosecutors decided who to try, not investigators.
I wish Nielson tracked when people use the mute button because I mute every presidential TV ad, every drug ad, and every ad for Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.
Well the younger generation is more technically inclined. And along came kodi. Everything ever broadcast since the beginning of broadcasting is available. Including the premium channels. And all free.
Cox Communications doesn't even offer a plan in Tulsa that carries all of the local channels. We get around 40 channels from a dozen or so transmitters here. But to get all of those channels, some of which end up in Cox's lineup on different premium lineups, it'd cost about what I pay in rent. And that's why I have an antenna...
Furries make the internet go.
Sure, 200 channels and there may only be 1 or 2 of them you are interested in at any given time. But having a wide selection can be nice.
Obviously the most efficient would be for there to be a single channel that shows exactly what I want to watch at all times. But of course people would complain about the high cost of that one channel versus the relatively inexpensive per channel cost of a 200 channel bundle.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I guess I would be in the negative 1% club since I don't subscribe to cable at all and only subscribe online to HBO during "Game of Thrones" season then swiftly cancel. The only 2 channels I would like to have, HGTV and Comedy, are not available separately, so I simply found alternative sources of entertainment such as Twitch and Youtube, both of which I gladly support (Twitch Turbo & Patreon for individual Youtube channels.)
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
Go ahead and start hiding money, take the items you don't want to lose and "give" them to your brother, and retain a lawyer. If your wife rabidly watches the bachelor, she is looking for a bachelor. You are not providing romance or the big D. A divorce is in your future. PREPARE!
Sounds about right: 90% of everything is crap, and glad for it - there's too much good stuff to watch as it is...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Got tired of paying for a ton of crap I don't ever watch, just to get 2 or 3 channels I did watch. There's at least a dozen OTA channels I receive with excellent signal strength and quality where I live, and I rarely have nothing to watch waiting for me on my DVR -- and the picture quality is better, too, because cable TV recompresses everything within an inch of it's life.
I believe companies like Comcast already realize this, as their profit margins are significant with this model; hence their resistance to provide "a la carte" programming. I also use a DVR, rarely watching live television -- I utilize only a small fraction of what I'm forced to pay for, if I want access to those channels (ie: extra package costs).