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Cord-Cutting Isn't Nearly as Significant as Cable Providers Make It Out To Be (cnbc.com)
From a report on CNBC: Despite legacy media's anxieties about cord-cutting, data suggest that the phenomenon isn't nearly as significant as cable providers make it out to be. In its 11th annual "Digital Democracy Survey," Deloitte found that the percentage of American households that subscribe to paid television services has remained relatively stable since 2012, even as adoption of streaming services has accelerated. In its survey of 2,131 consumers, Deloitte said two-thirds of respondents reported they have kept their TV subscriptions because they're bundled with their internet plan. Kevin Westcott, vice chairman and U.S. media and entertainment leader at Deloitte, told CNBC that bundling seems to be a huge deterrent for cord cutting.
This is quite significant.
The market where I live is serviced primarily by Cox and Verizon. Both offer internet only packages marginally cheaper than bundled services. So yeah, they have the cake and eat it too while still whining about everything.
The conglomos want to get you into thinking that by bundling you're saving money when you're not. until they get to a point where your entire monthly bill including internet is cheaper than just getting internet itself they still playing the con game.
Currently, Time-Spectrum-Warner has my internet, TV, and landline. Even if I cut the TV, they'd still get plenty of money from me, and the potential replacements for TV are all dependent on internet, and TSW isn't any worse on that than the competition.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I downgraded from fully loaded comcast to basic comast + netflix + prime + hbo go ... So I pay for the channels I want instead of paying for everything to get the channels I want and it saves me about 50% on our monthly bills.
The networks should take scant comfort from this. Yes, people may be keeping the subscriptions because of bundling, but how many are actually watching? I have a bunch of channels bundled with FIOS, but I would estimate 95% of my watching is streaming, with the balance being the occasional sports event.
You can't GET the higher speed internet tiers unless you also subscribe to either cable or voice.
You can get the basic tier, but nothing useful unless you're grandfathered in.
I kicked around upgrading to 100mb service and decided against it after doing the math on how much I would have to spend monthly on cable and hardware fees.
Yes it's Comcast / Xfinity. No there isn't an alternative.
With american cellular plans starting to offer reasonable amounts of "unlimited*" data, it's getting easier to actually cut the cord.
I was finally able to tell my useless DSL provider to get fucked last week, and after years of dialup speeds and connection timeouts during primetime due to overloaded copper from the neighborhood DSL concentrator to the CO, it felt soooo good. (No cable or fixed-wireless providers out here in the Boonies.)
Now if only Amazon Video let you specify how much bandwidth to use. Might have to set up a WiFi bridge with QoS to force it to SD resolution.
*"Unlimited" - Limited, but liveable if you're not streaming 24/7.
The problem with 'cord cutting' is that it's not one streaming service, but many.
After you get Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, CBS all access, Playstation, HBO GO, Sling, you are paying way over $100/month.
It's not easy to compare them either.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Cable providers can't really be that concerned about cord cutting either, or they would be doing something meaningful like dropping prices 30% rather than just trying to hook people into the next scam designed to look like they're going something but ultimately costing them nothing.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I just moved across the USA in the last year. In both places I lived, it was actually CHEAPER to buy mid-ranged (20-30 megabit) internet WITH basic cable than it would be to get just internet. In both cases it was 5 dollars cheaper a month as part of a "new signup bundle offer". After 12 months it becomes $15 more expensive to have both, BUT, I was told that I could cancel my television services at that time (and still pay $5 more a month than with the bundle costs).
My assumption is that they are trying to make the cable numbers look better. Note that they didn't show how much TV is actually being watched, only that people are still getting cable services
My second assumption is that they understand the power of laziness and/or non-confrontation. How much work/effort is needed to be on the phone for an hour (or more?) to cancel a service like tv channels while they try to force upsell you new services. I bet they know they can get some percentage of the population to pay the extra money for services they aren't using just to avoid dealing with the cable companies.
They just raised the internet prices to cover the basic channels and bundle it so the don't lose the presence on the TV.
If you live in an area that offers decent over-the-air coverage, you owe it to yourself to at least try and see what you can get with an antenna. The FCC offers an online tool to determine what stations are near you by zip code, No Cable offers similar, and ChannelMaster discusses available antennas, signal-strength, and other useful stuff. We're talking full HD TV of the major networks, and probably a few TNT-like channels, all for free like your grandparents remember it when they were growing up, and all it takes is an investment in time and an antenna you can pick up at Radio Shack or Best Buy.
Seriously, it's great. I'm watching the game in full non-compressed HD and not dropping a damn dime for it, thanks to a 14-inch square of plastic I put in the attic.
And the best part, if you already have coax installed throughout your place for delivering Cable, you can re-purpose that same coax to deliver signal from your antenna to every room outlet. Even with a little antenna, coax is so good, even with splitters, the signal from the antenna can deliver HD to all your TV's. The secret is to use as much coax as necessary to place the antenna in a spot in your home where you get best reception, like your attic if you have one, or outside a window. I ran coax from a cable outlet in an unused bedroom into a closet and up through the ceiling into the attic. That connection lit up the remainder of the coax network, via a 1-5 splitter, so that every remaining outlet now supports over 30 channels. Who the hell needs Cable?
Now truly, it all depends on where you live. YMMV. But if you're in an area with good coverage, paying for cable TV is probably losing you money, with or without promotional triple-play deals (there's all those added fees for taxes and cable-box rentals). With an antenna, Internet, and maybe a subscription to Netflix or Sling, most people would have all they need. You got a perfectly good tuner in your TV, so use it.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
If I had points I'd have modded the anonymous coward up. I'm also wondering, are you forced to watch commercials with cable or paid for streaming services? If so, that would make the need for actual viewers more acute, assuming advertisers are actually paying attention.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
I thought that was just the people that frequent places like this, saying that paying 10 sites $15 a month was cheaper than a $120 cable bill and saying that cable providers were doomed?
I use an antenna, and also add Rokus, and have Plex on my FreeBSD desktop.
During "Game of Thrones" I sign up for HBO Go - it costs $15 a month.
I also sign up for netflix off and on, and may go with Amazon Prime, since I buy stuff from Amazon anyway.
Works great, I am not missing anything.
I have been off of cable TV for more than 6 Years. My entertainment cost is roughly $40 plus the cost of internet. One thing I have, my family's attention and interaction. Without TV my kids no longer watch any television and communication between us is great. No dopey staring at the tv. The are on YouTube and other things that do not suck the attention out of them.
In checking my neighborhood forums, it seems like there are a lot of people cutting the comcast cord. I'm getting gig up and down for $48 a month but I personally am not much of a TV watcher. I have, mainly because the wife was watching and I wanted to share but now that I'm single, I haven't watched TV in 5 years. Not even as background noise.
I am starting to get advertising from some fiber based TV service out of Denver which would increase the price beyond what I was paying for comcast but again, I don't watch TV so to the bin it goes :)
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Verizon also made me an offer I couldn't refuse - a triple play at the double play price. The installation tech said that he had to activate the box, but that I didn't have to use it.
So he powered up the box, activated it, and then stuck it on a shelf in my basement.
I guess Verizon was hoping I would rent a movie from them instead of Amazon.
This doesn't make any sense. Cable providers are the ones downplaying the effect of cord-cutting.
Dear NBC/CBS/Fox/ABC et al - we aren't channel surfing on a Friday night, although we do watch some of your shows....via your apps on our AppleTV rather than using, say, a DVR (which we don't have). Comcast makes us buy TV service in order to have the higher speed internet (in my area that is speeds higher than 15mb/s)
So yes - we pay for it. But only to get to 50mb/s service (although that was recently upgraded to 100mb/s a few months ago).
I purchased the cheapest bundle to get high speed as both my wife and I work from home occasionally -- and the real reason is that we stream netflix on our iPads separately at night :-) Also - I can receive OTA which we used to do until realizing we needed more than 25mb/s service.
We spend most of our time watching Netflix and a bit of Amazon Prime. I pulled the power cord from the oversized Xfinity device so that my baby daughter wouldn't burn her hand on it.
While I've been tempted to watch the "free" bundled HBO I find the menu system on Xfinity to be tiresomely complex and slow. I just want to see the channels I subscribe to - not the other 960 that I don't. My Pavlovian response has developed "if the channel takes more than 2 seconds to appear - it isn't part of my subscription"
I don't know about the AC, but my streaming is Netflix and Hulu (ad-free). I still watch regular TV, but much less than I used to, and streaming isn't that far from being GoodEnough (tm). And even with regular TV, I FF past most of the ads.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
YMMV
Because the cable cartels have ensured via their pwnd representatives consumers have no choices. Cord cutting requires internet access of some type. It's the same company that offer phone/cable/internet. I tried to switch off the horrible comcast - I live in Seattle and my only other choice is a Frontier DLS with 3mb bandwidth.... really? someone in the US actually sells 3MB bandwidth? GAH!
Meanwhile in Australia, they're rolling out 1GB over LTE! Really! http://www.itwire.com/mobility...
The Country invented both the Internet and the Cell Phone doesn't even rank in the top 10 of global internet speeds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is just a colossal testimonial of how free market, greed, and the oligarchy no longer permit innovation.
they told me (politely) not to let the door hit ya where the dog shoulda bit ya. Still $50 bucks cheaper for Internet only.
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So they surveyed about 2,000 people. Out of the 22 million current customers. I think that falls into the "statistically insignificant" range of data samples.
Imagine the billions saved in productivity if everyone dropped cable TV. Too bad we probably just spend it watching porn.
theyre assuming that you'll put the bill on auto-pay & then forget about & wont notice a year later when your bill doubles.
And im sure it works a good chunk of the time.
Seems like things are going backwards in favor of the cable providers. I spend most of my viewing time on watching Netflix, Amazon Prime and various other channels available on multiple Roku's I own. So it looked so promising that I would be cord cutting with my multiple Roku's. But then Roku went full retard with their firmware updates making my boxes unstable and many channels completely unusable. It seems like all channel development and support from the providers stopped as well.
So okay I figured they screwed my Roku boxes so lets look at alternatives and they did not look as good as Roku. So ultimately ny old cable TV boxes are now far more impressive and stable compared to cord cutting solutions. This not to mention the hoops I had to jump through to add each channel to each Roku box. Sling was a consideration but a subscription for each box forget about it.
Yep, sure looks like we have gone backwards as far as cord cutting.
I don't watch professional sports, which makes it much easier to ditch paid television service.
Most college sports here in the United States are on cable as well. Last I checked, the College Football Playoff was on ESPN, and the NCAA Final Four was on TBS in alternate years, with many games in the rounds of 64, 32, 16, and 8 also on Turner cable channels.
And even with regular TV, I FF past most of the ads.
Using the DVR rented from the cable company, a $750* TiVo DVR, or something else? If the last, which?
* $200 for the hardware and $550 for the required program guide subscription.
If you need your pipe to be dependable, then it sounds like you're stuck a few decades back in tech time with streaming. You should come forward to the 21st century when enormous hard disks became affordable.
How do you (legally) fill such a hard drive with professionally produced video entertainment? Last I checked, Netflix was testing a pre-cache option in some regions but hadn't expanded pre-cache to its full library or to all regions where it offers service.
The only reason to have live TV is to gossip about reality TV as if the "stars" are real and their life events matter.
That doesn't help people who live with a C-SPAN and MSNBC junkie, such as my roommate. Her favorite "soap opera" is the Trump administration. Or do you claim that U.S. politicians aren't real and the legislation they enact does not matter to U.S. residents?
why would you need all of them since it's double content.
They're not always "double content", as you claim, as many series are exclusive to one service. A recent article by Mark Hill used the following example:
What I watch is plain old Over the Air Broadcast TV with a TV tuner card (I think you can get them for about $50 nowadays, depending on features, most of them are USB sticks.) I use it to record digital broadcast programs on my computer. (There's a very elaborate TV recording setup called MythTV but I find that me-tv suits me, though I can only get it to work with Linux Mint, and there must be similar things for Windows and OS X.)
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
In the San Francisco bay area (and from what I'm hearing from comcast techs: 'everywhere') they've imposed a 1TB a month data cap on cable internet.
This is royally fucked up. I don't see any reason why they would do this other than to make it less viable for people to use online content providers. Fuck them. I don't want to watch their fucking TV, I want watch what I want to watch through my internet connection. Comcast are complete marketing gouging assholes.
It takes someone with the patience of a rock to actually get the person on the other end of the phone to actually cancel your TV service. Oh, and because of bundling this saves you.... zero money.
I'm interested. Does the recording keep up even if you're using the computer as your primary workstation at the same time, or do you pretty much have to build a second computer and dedicate it to DVR duty?
I live in Norway, and recently got fiber installed from Canal Digital. The price was about $100 per month for 100 Mbit/s Internet + TV. Recent new legislation in Norway requires cable companies to offer Internet without TV, so I called to cancel my TV subscription. They said it couldn't be done. I persisted. They said I that if I keep my TV subscription, they'd give me 500 Mbit/s Internet and TV for $95 per month. I accepted, of course, but I returned the set-top box, so I can't actually watch TV. So now I have more bandwidth than I know what to do with, and I tick the right boxes in their statistics. Apparently, it's *very* important to them that people appear to subscribe to their TV service.
Okay, so...the first thing is far the best bang for the buck you'll get is a SiliconDust Homerun HD Prime. Get a CableCard from your provider, and give it a coax line, an Ethernet cable, and some power.
Now, any computer on your network is a DVR. Still running Windows 7? Windows Media Center is amazing. MythTV is excellent, and Plex just released a DVR module.
These (and a few more) can run on whatever computer is convenient, but the bigger question is playback - if your DVR computer isn't hooked up to your TV, you're looking at a client/server model. MythTV does this pretty well, and WMC is also capable of it.
Be aware that if you have HBO (or your cable company is terrible enough to introduce the copy protect flags), most OSS applications won't be able to record the stream.
It'll probably take a Saturday afternoon to iron everything out, but it's *so* worth it.
I called to get set up with Comcast and they quoted me outrageous rates for basic internet, which were nearly the same as if I bundled other crap on top of it. I said, I want the rate I see here on your website, just the basic service. The person on the phone refused to admit the rate existed, then acknowledged that it did but said that she wasn't allowed to offer it over the phone. I said, give me the plan or it's false advertising.
For $40/month, gods be with me, I got an internet connection so fast it maxes out my local network. I get nearly 12MB/second sustained, even over hours, and I don't even know how much faster it really is because I haven't bothered upgrading everything to gigabit.
Was it because I was firm but polite? Maybe a mistake? I may never know.
So yeah. I hate Comcast too, but I'm pretty happy with them right now.
It is because the more subscribers they can show, the better prices they are able to negotiate from channel providers.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
Recording of broadcast TV is not that demanding actually. Mostly it's just copy data from the device without trying to decode it. A one hour, full resolution TV broadcast, when recorded on my system might be 8 gig. So you're copying 8 gig of data in an hour when you record. (I have had 1 hour programs that were as much as 12 gig, but that's unusual.)
Playback is a different matter. If you've got a full resolution high definition recording, you need some CPU horsepower to get a smooth playback. Nevertheless, on my not so very new or powerful main computer I can watch a program from the file while it's being recorded. (My cheap little notebook computer is a different matter.)
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
All of the March madness channels are available on ps vue, fwi
My wife and I were in this predicament of needing ESPN, etc, until we decided since we really only like college football, and the only team we particularly care about is the Mountaineers (her alma mater). We ditched cable sports entirely, get season tickets every year and just drive to Morgantown for the home games. Sure, we rent a hotel room and pay for gas and food, but it's been worth it no matter if they win or lose. Homecoming game alone makes it all worth the costs and travel time involved just for the social experience.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
We are dropping TV/Phone next month.
I've been through a lot of providers - they all have the same song and dance. I bet they're completely fine with juggling subscribers. Come on.. Who doesn't bounce back and forth to keep the 'introductory' rates?
Just because statistics are still "in favor" of cable companies doesn't mean cord-cutting isn't a rising trend. Consumers are increasingly discovering the benefits of cost-effective alternatives as providers slack in delivering quality content for the price. I am a former Netflix customer (which served just fine as a replacement for cable) but switched to SelectTV to save even more money. Sorry cable companies, you've lost a customer after years of shoddy service and poor programming and I'm certainly not the only one in this growing movement.