Slashdot Mirror
There Will Be 22 Million Cord Cutters By 2018, Says Report (dslreports.com)
A new report by eMarketer predicts that 22.2 million U.S. adults will have cut the cord on cable, satellite or telco TV service by the end of 2017, which is up 33% over 2016. It also notes that ad investment will expand just 0.5% to $71.65 billion this year, down from the $72.72 billion predicted in the company's original first quarter forecast for 2017. From a report via DSLReports: This year, there will be 22.2 million cord-cutters ages 18 and older, a figure up 33.2% over 2016. That's notably higher than the 15.4 million eMarketer previously estimated. The total number of U.S. adult cord-nevers (users that have never signed up for a traditional cable TV connection) will grow 5.8% this year to 34.4 million. Note that eMarketer's numbers don't include streaming options from the likes of Dish (Sling TV) or AT&T (DirecTV Now), though so far gains in subscribers for these services haven't offset the decline in traditional cable TV subscribers anyway.
At one point, in my area, Comcast Internet-Only was priced at $78 / month. They priced a Basic-cable + Internet bundle at $72 / month. I signed up for the $6 / month savings, but never hooked up a cable TV.
Cord-cutters? Cord-nevers? Are we running out of labels to identify humans?
When Comcast Broke my equipment with Encrypted QAM, I dropped their service.
They broke 3 "cable ready" TVs.
They broke 4 "cable ready" VCR.
They broke 4 "Clear QAM" network TV tuners.
They broke 1 life-time TiVo.
So, I dropped their service, put up a $30 antenna in the attic, connected it to the network TV tuners, which also support ATSC. Getting 70 channels "for free". Sure, 45 of those are wacko religious and shopping channels. About 20 are entertaining enough to watch a little.
We read more books now.
The TVs are all gone. I kept 1 VCR (very high end). The tivo is long gone, useless.
We don't really care about sports in the USA. Our favorite sport has extremely bad coverage here and NBC geo-blocks our access to purchase the world-wide (except USA) web streaming service offered with their exclusive license for the USA of that content - which they don't show. Assholes.
When you get cable with huge prices let's say 5 comapnies all around same price and then cord cutting services -75% price, then when people realise it, it is no big news, that people don't like cord. I think right now what is keeping cord people is the exclusives.. What you can find on piratebay.
Cable TV is dying, Slashdot confirms it!!!
and changing services and plans (ala carte, death to 'bundles' and 'contracts', etc), the cable and satellite companies will just jack the price up for their remaining subscribers.
case in point: our $100 after tax internet and cable with EVERY channel, even premiums, is now $140 for internet (same speed, i.e. 'slowest and cheapest available') and basic cable (one step up from broadcast-only). that basic cable package today includes about 20% fewer channels than that same package did a decade ago; and they've also obsoleted our tivo and pc tuners (which we haven't replaced, cuz money, or done what they *want* us to do, subscribe to theirs instead) through encrypting *everything* on qam not just premiums. to get the same we had before, including dvr capabilities, our bill would nearly *double* to over $250.
47 Billion by 2025. There's an xkcd. Google it, I can';t be arsed.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The alternatives are already getting worse than cable.
Up until now, the alternatives to cable are awesome. Sign up with Netflix and you enjoy a huge variety of shows and movies. For now. Disney already pulled their content out to create their own streaming service. You think it will be long until the various networks do the same?
In the end, you'll end up with the same ugly shit that cable has become. Only even worse. Now, on cable you get a "basic package" with a handful of channels you can watch and a load of religious, shopping or otherwise unusable channels they mostly add to boast "50 free channels". Want to see show X on channel A? Get package K with 20 new channels, all of them bullshit except the one you want to watch for the one show you want to see.
And with streaming, it will soon be the same. With Netflix being the "basic package" where you get two old shows that you enjoy to rerun now and then, and with every network creating its own streaming service that you have to get separately and pay extra for, to get the one show that you want to see from the 1000 they "offer".
I could see that people stop "cutting" the cable when they notice that streaming has become the same kind of bullshit, so why bother?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I have yet to find a cord cutting option that is worth anything. Yes I can steal all kinds of programming with KODI, but legal options are more expensive than cable. Everyone starting a streaming servers and wants $10-20/month for some nitch set of programs. THat meets cable prices pretty quick.
i like penus
Most are just receiving different services on the cable. Streaming instead of traditional TV channels. Cord-cutting is going without a cable, fiber, DSL, or satellite connection altogether.
COE
Which is not to watch TV to begin with. There are plenty of things you can do in all that time you now spend in front of a TV: having fun with friends and family, reading books, gardening, sports, enjoying sunsets, playing computer games, and many, many more.
Is that you don't have any alternative to cable companies for "useful" Internet services.
I would love to be able to completely cut the cord...
Why? For years they've been overcharging us because they've lobbied to wreck the regulatory schema. For example Susan Crawford's book "Captive Audience" has a section where she crunches the numbers, net service we pay $30 to $80 for per month, it costs them between $2 and $3 to provide it. I could see tripling or even quadrupling the cost but come on a factor between 10 and 40 is applied. That's just out and out rape.
I'm dropping Sky in the UK and going to streaming services, namely NetFlix and NowTv. Amazon isn't for me. I've given up Sky due to the endless adverts. I've only been watching box sets on Sky recently which are mostly on NowTv (owned by Sky) and the NowTV sets don't start with a Lias of ads. I also noted that TVPlayer is available on my Roku and has plenty of channels I'd watch but it usually doesn't work. When I lived in Florida, I had to get a TiVo as the ads there came up so often it was impossible to follow the show I was watching.
Very true. Maybe the term is compensation for the hard truth that a very few monopolies, protected by our political representatives, control all wireline access to the Internet. Until the monopoly control of the (almost never more than two) incumbents are broken over the "last mile" is broken, no one who continues receiving Internet service can truly say they "cut the cord". Note that the current FCC chairman's fantasy of big telco wireless somehow providing an alternative, especially for rural areas, are from an engineering standpoint the ravings of a fool or a snake-oil salesman. There are many excellent WISPs out there fighting the good fight, but they're few and far between: and limited by the physics of current technology.
We had basic cable. It was analog, and OK. Over time, it carried internet. We dumped the DSL line (remember copper ?) and went with cable internet...where we've been save a brief and very expensive two years with FiOs. Lovely service, but all the telco taxes apply, which they don't with cable. Cable then went digital QAM, which was OK, until they decided to scramble ALL signals and force you to pay $8 per month per box. I was able to avoid this due to cablecards in TiVos. One month my bill goes up $7...."Sports Fee". Now, I don't watch sports, don't care, and don't subscribe. Snip. I'm happy to report that my $75 antenna gets all the local stations clearly. The OTA signal looks better than the CATV signal. My Tivo and ChannelMaster boxes record easily, and were amortized years ago. Cable has way too many commercials. The few times I'm subjected to such a feed, in hotels, etc, make me turn it off....indeed, I avoid watching anything in real-time. How many drug commercials for horrible conditions can a person watch ? The only thing left is to scam my in-laws password for a few streaming options that demand you subscribe to classic cable, which strikes me as having to buy a Steamer ticket to fly to London from New York. My kids already have a list of shared passwords for HBO and everything else. I will be pirating CBS new Star Trek, cause that one is just an F-U.
When people say "cable cutting" it means "cable TV", not "generic cable that can mean anything".
#DeleteFacebook
Haven't had cable/satellite TV in a decade...don't really miss it.
Also haven't bought a smartphone yet...don't really need one.
The only cord left to cut, is the Internet...
There are 22 million people who still have cable TV? Did they just forgot to cancel the subscription?
Is that "limited basic", which is only the locals, public access, and home shopping, or is it "expanded basic", with MSNBC, ESPN, and the rest? And does $72/mo include the local programming retransmission consent surcharge ($3/mo in my area) and the regional sports retransmission consent surcharge ($5/mo in my area)?
I'd agree with you when it comes to Sling TV. It's just like a mini cable company without responsibility to maintain any delivery infrastructure. The website seems deliberately confusing (like cable companies). It's not immediately clear what you're getting and what it costs. The best I can decipher, it first seems that it's $45/month for most of the channels (i guess). Then you keep scrolling down and it's going on about "extras" for $5 but never explains what the hell that even means or what channels you actually get. Takes me back to the days I had cable TV. Not saying there aren't advantages (such as billing). But if it looks and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
You can start and stop streaming services as needed.
Until streaming services realize this and jack up the price without an annual commitment. Amazon Prime service, for example, is typically sold by the year.
Same with HBO.
Except HBO still trickles out its series weekly. If your subscription is on hiatus, you're vulnerable to being left out of water cooler conversations among active subscribers.
I like baseball so I get the MLB.tv subscription and watch all I want.
But you still have to keep your subscription active throughout the season unless you like months-old baseball. And last I checked, the leagues still sold particular matches exclusively to traditional TV outlets such as Disney's ESPN and ABC, causing them to be blacked out online for days. You address that somewhat:
Fortunately I don't care about the local team anyway so I don't need cable.
The streaming services tend to black out playoffs and other games that are televised nationally. So the team you follow is likely to end up blacked out at some time.
Streaming has saved me a ton of money and I don't have to purchase cable "news"
So when you want to sit in a recliner, unwind from a day's work, and catch up on current events, what do you do instead of watching TV news?
Staying a year behind may be practical for some series. But it isn't very practical for programming with a short shelf life, such as sports, political talk shows, or scripted dramatic series whose most popular discussion forum closes the thread for each episode two weeks to six months after its first airing. The same is true of video games, where you end up a year closer to having the online multiplayer matchmaking service terminated permanently.
The alternative in theory is finding a job in a city that has fiber to the home and moving your family there. Some Slashdot users find this practical; others do not. But if you have to move for a job anyway, consider the availability of fiber before you accept the job offer.
Are there any existing sites where I can match what current run shows I watch against what services carry them and what devices can access those services?
For broadcast networks I can plug the antenna into the Tivo, but for cable shows some are only streamed on the networks website, or some are on one streaming service and not the other. It should be possible to compute some minimum covering set that gets a viewer everything they want, but every time I try plotting it out myself I get stuck.
So, you are streaming everything via wireless then? For a large number of us the Internet comes through our cable company or not at all. So, maybe we cancel cable TV but we can't really cut the cord, can we? Now that Trump has appointed a cable/telco company FCC commission, net-neutrality is done. It is only a matter of time until we "cable-cutters" find that our streaming services will be raising their rates because the cable companies are charging them for access to customers (us).
We are also seeing the cable companies signing deals to lock up content from various cable channels. The cable companies and telcos are also setting up their own streaming services and could buy out the others. I bet that they won't block their own streaming services, probably they'll zero-rate them so they don't count against your download limit, while lowering the boom on you for using so much bandwidth watching those nasty 3rd party services.
When you have a natural monopoly and the government isn't inclined to do anything about it you can do what ever you want and get away with it. Our only choice is to pay or do without.
The cable television companies have gotten very greedy because of their veritable monopolies and duopolies. In my area, you have a choice of Verizon Fios or Comcast Xfinity; if you can even call it a choice because Verizon Fios internet speeds are much faster given that it is fibre to the home. I hope the upstarts offering TV via streaming really disrupt an industry that is ripe for disruption.
But it can easily be seen as likely to end in a death spiral as the cord cut becomes more and more advantageous the higher and higher the price of cable rises to get the cash out of the lower pool. Which lowers the pool, increases the cost and leads to more loss of customers in the pool, and round and round it goes.
And where was it said it was wrong for them to do it?
Pick your nose and fart all you like. Pointing out "You picked your nose!" is not saying it's wrong to pick your nose. It just points out you are doing it.
companies are not cutting it, only moving it to internet.. same junk, same or higher price , having to buy packages of mostly dung you never use...
Either you don't watch video at home or you do. If you do, you aren't a "cord-cutter" you are just using one of many different cords. They all deliver their video bits in roughly the sam way.
I cut the cord after DISH’s fee creep got over $180 a month. Local cable co’s basic line up is literally 50% news/entertainment and 50% shopping/religious/junk channels not worth the $70/mo and a 2yr contract with no price lock. So I get 10 local OTA channels (up to 60 after dark from D/FW if the troposphere cooperates) and anything else I want to see I watch online or on a Fire Stick. Only $33 for 7.5Mps DSL on my telco bill.
but I still have to have cable to get decent internet or the price actually goes up. If the internet wasn't being held hostage by greedy cable companies and their mysterious Nelson boxes i have yet to see or ever hear of anyone actually possessing, the world would be a better place. If you watch television, you are an asshole. So the box sits. On the other hand, providing I don't have to update Adobe f'in flash(which isn't going to happen), the 3 or 4 shows I do watch often play on the internet commercial free and instantaneously, though I suspect I am ad-blocking commercial content.