Slashdot Mirror
Cord-Cutting Spikes Fivefold In Cable TV's Worst Quarter Ever (fastcompany.com)
schwit1 quotes a report from Fast Company: Cable's day of reckoning has come. With all the major cable and satellite companies having reported their quarterly numbers, analyst firm MoffettNathanson put together a new cord-cutting report, and things are bad. Pay-TV providers lost an estimated 762,000 pay-TV subscribers over the first three months of this year -- five times more than they lost during the same period last year. To make matters worse, Q1 has historically been a strong season for pay TV.
What does direct comcox up your bum not know how many customers they have?
The estimate comes from the analyst, not from comcox.
But the number is meaningless anyway, because many people have cable but never watch it. I am a cable subscriber because it is actually cheaper to subscribe to Internet+TV than to subscribe to just Internet. But I haven't watched live TV in years. I think they give away the TV at less than zero cost so they can quote a higher subscriber number to advertisers.
The killer difference between Netflix and Comcast/DirecTV/Dish Network (the only three I can get at my house) is honest advertising and billing. With Netflix, the price advertised is what you pay, end of story. With the others, the price advertised is a fancy and you have to check your bill carefully every month because they start playing games and introducing fees and package changes. And if you're not willing to call up sales and customer retention departments and chew out some hapless entry level representative every six months, they will keep jacking prices until you're paying $180 per month for something that said "$30 per month" on the original sales brochure.