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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.
Dropping revenue means they need to squeeze the remaining schlubs by playing more ads, and increasing monthly fees. No dropping of revenue can be tolerated by these guys.
I know it will still be years off, but I still welcome their impending demise.
Hopefully someone will automate the 'tv show licensing bureaucrats' out of a job, and replace reruns with Bollywood dramas and Japanese gameshows. There's plenty of stuff made around the world that never airs elsewhere that could be replacing the reruns.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I won't use a service that doesn't offer an ad-free experience. Happy to pay for it, but I won't be forced to watch ads.
Me too. My family went on a trip and my kids turned on the TV in the hotel room. When the first commercial came on, they thought the show was over, and were confused by the ending. I realized then that they had no idea what a "commercial" was.
I spent the next hour explaining my childhood, and how every kid knew all the jingles, like "Coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs" , "I wish I was an Oscar-Meyer Weiner", and "Rice-a-Roni". I told them about Tony the Tiger, Mr Clean, and Cap'n Crunch, but they just rolled their eyes and started watching Youtube on their Chromebooks.
Most people hate their cable company. But they stick with it for ESPN.
To a large extent, the current exodus from Cable is really an exodus from ESPN. Why the sudden shift? ESPN became political. Most hardcore watchers of professional sports are conservative (something like a 65/35 split), so ESPNs decision to hit progressive talking points hard at every opportunity, fire commenters for offending progressives, and so on, was the sort of bone-headed decision only an MBA could make.
The conservative blog comment section and message boards I read have been growing in anger over this for more than a year now, to the point now I see a constant stream of "you know what, I stopped watching $SPORT and I found I didn't miss it. I went and threw the ball with my kid instead - should have been doing that more all along. Goodbye ESPN!"
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.