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Netflix Has More American Subscribers Than Cable TV (engadget.com)
According to Leichtman Research estimates from the first quarter of 2017, there are more Netflix subscribers in the U.S. (50.85 million) than there are customers for major cable TV networks (48.61 million). While it doesn't mean Netflix is bigger than TV because it doesn't account for the 33.19 million satellite viewers, it represents a huge milestone for a streaming service that had half as many users just 5 years ago. Engadget reports: The shift in power comes in part through Netflix's ever-greater reliance on originals. There's enough high-quality material that it can compete with more established networks. However, it's also getting a boost from the decline of conventional TV. Those traditional sources lost 760,000 subscribers in the first quarter of the year versus 120,000 a year earlier. Leichtman believes a combination of cord cutters and reduced marketing toward cost-conscious viewers is to blame. Cable giants might not be in dire straits, but they're clearly focusing on their most lucrative customers as others jump ship for the internet.
Surprise...Nabors
I want to watch live sports. How can I still do that while cord cutting?
Bazinga!
I don't know anyone with an Internet connection fast enough to stream Netflix.
"reliance on originals"? How about that it costs 1/10th as much? duh.
Not surprising since Cable TV providers keep raising prices (TWC just raised my prices again) and more people are leaving it. I hope there's a mass exodus one of these days. I'd LOVE to see cable providers all die off.
>"Cable giants might not be in dire straits, but they're clearly focusing on their most lucrative customers as others jump ship for the internet."
"Focusing on"? How? By holding on to more and more useless channels? By raising prices continuously? By offering only deceptive "introductory" pricing models? By constantly fighting and making life difficult for TiVo and other third-party box owners? If this is their "focus", they are doing to be in dire straits before they know it.
They don't necessarily have to stream to compete (because DVRs can provide an excellent experience), but one thing they need to do soon is to offer a pay-for-each-channel-wanted model and allow customers to customize what they want to watch. I am BEYOND SICK of paying for crap I don't want and subsidizing others' channels. Sports is perfect example. I bet a HUGE portion of my cable TV bill is poured into sports, something I have ZERO interest in, but yet comprises probably 30 or more channels. Now throw out all religious channels, infomercial channels, game show channels, non-English channels, and reality TV channels. I bet I am now up to about 85%.
Oh, and when they do offer streaming, it is just the same crap content on their existing channels, but with the bonus of being only in stereo not Dolby 5.1, with a crappy low-bandwidth picture, and often forced commercials. All with silly time limits, a poor interface, and sometimes flaky as hell.
Focus, indeed.
Sources comment that the vast majority of new subscribers came in because of Netflix's huge amount of original Adam Sandler content.
That cable networks are not going to respond to this situation by offering better value for the money! Monopolies never do.
Cable TV prices have been increasing at four times the rate of inflation for years. Forcing people to buy bundles of channels instead of a la carte offerings for less money, etc., etc.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Of course, cable companies jerk around customers by charging them arbitrary fees for things they don't want. But aside from that, many of us hate having to watch 20 minutes of commercials an hour, for programming we supposedly paid a subscription to get. Netflix--so far--has stayed away from advertisements within the shows you watch. As long as they keep that up, they have MY money!
Those are just the households who pay for access.
All the moochers and account-sharers ought to double that.
What percentage of American households can even get cable? Now, what percentage can get Netflix? Yep, it's higher. When you add to that just how lame Cable is...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Of course! If would be weird if Netflix had any cable TV at all.
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
I think the direction cable/satellite companies are going to go, is bundled a la carte. Telecoms make tons of money from bundling (TV/internet/phone) already, and the idea will be pitched to consumers as 'build your own bundle', and pitched to executives as 'giving customers more opportunity to give us their money.' Essentially, instead of tiers (basic cable, expanded cable, ultimate) with multiple over-the-top channels (HBO, Showtime etc.) you pay for individually, there will be small bundles of channels that you can pick and choose from, with no base tiers.
So, there'll likely be a bundle that contains local channels, another that contains a few channels owned by Time Warner, another that contains a few channels owned by Disney, a bundle with a few sports channels, bundles with a few related themes (movie channel/hbo/showtime bundle). It'll be mixed-up enough from how it currently works that it can be advertised as 'pay for the channels you care about, and not the ones you do not', while the price is structured so that people actually pay more to get what they currently get. Few people will notice, thinking "I can just cut out this and this to save money", the additional control obscuring the price hike. Some streaming services like Sling already do something similar, but I think it will be made more granular, and be more heavily advertised. Cordcutters who really only want that one channel are able to do that for potentially less money than Netflix; the cable company will likely even subsidize your bill a little, on the expectation that having you as a customer means you might expand your lineup later, rather than letting you leave and be someone else's customer instead. I expect this will cause a big enough shakeup in the industry that everyone will see it coming years before it happens, and all the telecoms will get onboard at the same time. Thus, there will be rumors coming from industry analysts long before this drops.
But I'll be surprised if this happens any earlier than "too late to stave off irrelevance."
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
There goes the accusation that people are sharing accounts
https://slashdot.org/story/326...
Twinstiq, game news
10$ vs.100$, who would have thought folks would notice? cease fire stand down,, there's moms & tiny babys in all of our towns..
Amazing how the cable companies screwed it up, huh?
They were perfectly placed to profit from the dotcom boom and later; everyone was obsessed with Yahoo-esque approaches of "being the portal to the interwebz" and/or the browser "wars", (something that continues to this day, except that Google has pretty much won everywhere in search, with Chrome(ium) and on mobile with Android etc.)
Yet all this time the cable (and phone) guys owned the last mile into your house, with TV and Internet along with it.
With a bit of vision but - above all - accepting that they would have to cannibalize their existing offer, they could have used the massive subsidies they received to build out a great network, with good, fast service and compelling original content.
What did they do? Sit on their fat-ass, rent-seeking business model, ripping people off with poor, expensive service and bundles of advert-laden crap channels. Good riddance.
Netflix to me always has been a supplemental service provider of content and not a primary like cable or satellite. Netflix provides a on demand type of service where cable or satellite provide live, and rebroadcasts programming from certain networks. Given how inexpensive Netflix is, its not surprising its very popular for anyone who has internet service.
I read that AT&T and other big comm companies now have limit on data on their internet service (1TB for AT&T) to try to force the people to buy their TV service (instead of using things like Netflix). How soon before other companies like Charter follow suit?
Greedy bastards.
are the two sets mutually exclusive, or do some people have both cable tv and netflicks? that would be materially useful information to know
All this cord cutter stuff i nonsense, you still need a fat pipe to get NEtflix, hulu, Youtube.. yada yada, so the cable companies saw this cord-cutting nonsense coming a decade back , so the solution is simply to keep raising rates of data only subscriptions, and making up the difference with their Whale customers who pay for triple play , mutiple boxes through the nose.. sorry most folks here at /. are not cables prime customer base, its joe six pack with 3 kids and wants to sit on the couch and with a beer and just watch the Yankees LIVE. As soon as we have a cost for cost data alternative to cable then I will say a change is afoot until then cable still has most of us by the ...
i KNOW they will suck
You've made it abundantly clear that you know fuck all, tbh.
By the way, sentences start with a capital.
Internet is absolutely on its way, isn't it? http://williamreview.com/im-vi...
http://williamreview.com/