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Cord-Cutters Drive Cable TV Subscribers to a 17-Year Low (houstonchronicle.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post:
On Wednesday, AT&T told regulators that it expects to finish the quarter with about 90,000 fewer TV subscribers than it began with. AT&T blamed a number of issues, including hurricane damage to infrastructure, rising credit standards and competition from rivals. The report also shows AT&T lost more traditional TV customers than it gained back through its online video app, DirecTV Now. And analysts are suggesting that that's evidence that cord-cutting is the main culprit... "DirecTV, like all of its cable peers, is suffering from the ravages of cord-cutting," said industry analyst Craig Moffett in a research note this week. Moffett added that while nobody expected AT&T's pay-TV numbers to look good, hardly anyone could have predicted they would look "this bad."
The outlook doesn't look much healthier for the rest of the television industry. Over the past year, cable and satellite firms have collectively lost nearly 3 million customers, according to estimates by market analysts at SNL Kagan and New Street Research. The number of households with traditional TV service is hovering at about the level it was in 2000, according to New Street's Jonathan Chaplin, in a study last week. Other analysts predict that, after factoring in AT&T's newly disclosed losses, the industry will have lost 1 million traditional TV subscribers by the end of this quarter.
The outlook doesn't look much healthier for the rest of the television industry. Over the past year, cable and satellite firms have collectively lost nearly 3 million customers, according to estimates by market analysts at SNL Kagan and New Street Research. The number of households with traditional TV service is hovering at about the level it was in 2000, according to New Street's Jonathan Chaplin, in a study last week. Other analysts predict that, after factoring in AT&T's newly disclosed losses, the industry will have lost 1 million traditional TV subscribers by the end of this quarter.
last bill was 41% over last year's same month, same service, same channels. as i said, last bill.
given that media can be delivered and consumed, without change in quality or convenience, through generalized methods, like the internet, specialized ways of delivery and consumption will be obsolete.
some specialized ways, like movie theaters, may last a bit longer because they enable consumption experience not yet available through generalized methods .
Cable fees just as high as they ever were... where's the incentive to stay with cable?
Well, I dunno how things are there in the US, but if it's anything like Brazil (and I think it is), people should be celebrating on the streets.
Cable TV companies are oligopolies, some of the biggest companies in the country, and they abused their position in every way possible. Price gouging, exploiting legal loopholes for shady tie-ins, bundling sales, chopping up consumer rights in every way possible, offering the worst costumer service imaginable, using aggressive marketing tactics and whatnot.
And they constantly keep trying to change the rules and force the costumers to either pay more, or receive less, on lame justifications that they don't have enough money to upgrade their infrastructure, all the while posting record profits every year.
A whole set of consumer laws in recent years were passed because of them, including anti spam/telemarketing call laws, the entire net neutrality debacle, a bunch of stuff regarding how call centers should work to attend their costumers, etc etc.
Every year they come up to threaten yet another restringent rule that will kill connection for a significant portion of their users. As if they could re-write the contracts we agreed upon when signing up for the service.
The more market share for cable TV shrinks, the better for everyone as I see it. It'll be better for people who likes their cable, as the companies will have to fight to keep them and give them better service, and more options for us who never cared about cable in the first place.
I went over a decade having to pay for cable just because there was some shady bundling crap that made it cheaper to pay for the entire package rather than paying for Internet alone. The majority of the country are still stuck on this deal because they have no other options. Like I said, oligopolies. They will price fix, they will close deals behind curtains to dominate certain areas, they will exploit people as much as they can.
Fortunately, I moved to a place where there's fiber Internet available... jumped at the opportunity as fast as I could, it's like I'm finally getting what I pay for. No more unexplained outages, a fair working connection for the price I pay (which is lower than if I had to pay for the cable TV/Internet bundle), good costumer service, and no lies on speed, throttling practices and data caps.
First:
I subscribe to one of the dish TV services. They rave about how great they are offering me 180-something channels. Of which I can find something to watch on exactly four. The rest are sales blurbs (lots of sales blurbs) or religious pandering for not-my-religion or Spanish language or ancient re-runs. (sorry, no offence meant, but I don't speak Spanish. Now where are the German language channels? But I digress). So I am paying all this money to watch my local city's news at 9:00, weather, an occasional old movie without commercials and re-runs of the Big Bang Theory. I don't care about the other 180-something chunks of wasted bandwidth.
Second:
I remember the early 1980s when cable was first starting to penetrate the markets. Their big claim was that rather than all the commercials on broadcast TV I only pay a single monthly fee and watch commercial-free television. Then the marketeers discovered that they once again had a bunch of captive eyeballs. So I surf past a movie that I should like. It's theatre length was 72 minutes and it runs from 6:00 to 9:00. Three hours. guess what they fill the extra time with?
Cable and satellite TV are dying because they are dinosaurs milking an old abusive business model and not understanding how the world has changed.
Get in touch with them - why? For commiseration? It's not as if the newspaper and publishing industries have figured out a solution either.
#DeleteChrome
But what really, do you think is going through a CEO's mind?
While I sympathize especially with employees that may lose jobs, I have no mercy for companies that used to gouge ordinary folk with tens of [useless] channels in the not so distant past.
The largest cost in a typical standard non-premium bundle is sports. In short it is forcing people to subsidize sports fans. No wonder people are going to cheaper non-sports alternatives where live TV is not that important.
Start offering services a la carte, at a reasonable price, and many of us might consider signing up again. Persist in your ridiculous extortions tactics, whereby to watch a couple of channels that people are interested in they have to pay for dozens that only carry junk, and expect the rate of defections to increase. Your call.
Cable is convenient!
You can watch it on the box we approve, at the time we set, on the channel we set, at the resolution we set, on the box you pay to rent from us.
Don't like it at that time, pay to record it, don't forget you pay to record the commercials too.
Don't watch it in time, don't worry, rent the episode from us!
Don't like the content in SD? Pay more for HD, with HD commercials!
Don't like the channel, pay for the same channel, in HD, timeshifted, with timeshifted commercials!
100 Channels of crap
100 Channels of crap in HD!
100 Channels of timeshifted crap!
100 channels of timeshifted HD crap!
10 Channels of sports, but what you want to watch is blacked out!
10 Channels of radio, playing crap, and with commercials!
10 Channels of shopping crap!
Don't forget, we have tons of C-F grade movies, with lots of commercials, with the swearing cut out, and did we mention commercials?
We rotate in 1-5 A-B grade movies, but they are the same movies, the C-F grade movies get constantly added! You can watch Overboard! as many times as you can stomach!
All for a small monthly fee!
-Cable box rental fee
-Cable fee
-Fee payment fee
-FCC Fee
-FCC Surcharge
-FCC Levy
-FCC Premium
-Local Content Fee
-Local Content Improvement Fee Premium
Ditch netflix and their cheap boxes and sticks! Your good old clunky power-hungry cable box is where it's at!
The cable companies are regulated utilities, granted monopoly in the areas they operation. They pushed through rate increase after rate increase, bundled useless channels, had abysmal customer service and all the arrogant entitlement attitude that comes with being a monopoly.
All their infrastructure has already been paid for thanks to friendly regulators and relentless rate increases. They could have dropped their prices and made it impossible for the wireless companies to compete. They could have improved customer service. But no. They believed they are entitled to cash delivered to their coffers in fire hoses. They believed they had the customers by their balls and wanted to how hard the customers will scream and how hard they can squeeze.
They can still fight back. Their infrastructure has been paid for, and it has much larger bandwidths than cell towers. They can compete if they wanted to compete.
But they don't want to compete. Looks like.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I am not a sports fan. I pay a regional sports fee. Why? I get over 200 channels. Watch, tops, a couple dozen. Why pay for the others? Ala carte is suppressed by the cable and satellite providers, but it is how to save their industry and negotiate lower fees to the source owners. Why license CNN if only 5% view CNN? The single purpose channels are also a losing proposition. And then there are the nickel and dime fees, extra receiver, pay $7.99 a month. DVR ability, pay per month, HD pay per month, 4K WOW pay per month. Formerly you'd subscribe to a movie package and the next would cost less, then less for the third, etc. Now they not only cost more per package than Netflix and way more than Amazon (with Prime Video as a perk)... Video on demand? A great concept, except it also comes with commercials you can't fast forward through. And you're paying for it already. I used to get every channel except sports and it cost about $90 a month. Now my basic "total choice that is far from total" costs that, and it more than doubles with all the added fees. Add that to "buying" a DVR/Receiver that you are really leasing monthly after paying them more than the cost of manufacture for a device locked to their system... Wow. If they started reducing fees and negotiating cheaper costs, like put networks in a selectable package and see how fast the network stations dropped their ask for presence. Yes, You pay for the networks through higher fees, and the networks still get to count you for advertising rates. Everyone is asking a bit too much and the broadcast model is going to collapse. I really want to eliminate the high cost of carriage of sports channels etc. Watch their ad rates drop as people are no longer counted as potential viewers. Then watch as the cable providers demand cheaper fees. And then watch as they fail to pass them on and still fail.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Most newspapers have transitioned into a hybrid online/paper model. The cable TV model can follow. They have the rights to shows in the area. But they don't have any local streaming setup. There are piles of options they refuse to even consider, sounds like the newspapers, right after subscriptions flatlined and before the cliff.
Learn to love Alaska
I like being able to watch TV on my own schedule. Not having to miss out on my preferred shows due to conflicting schedules regarding things more important or time sensitive than relaxing.
Preface: I have no political or philosophical position on whether NFL players should stand or kneel for the pledge. I'm speaking not of their "cause", but rather of it's effects.
The primary reason most people I know still have cable is because of sports ( football, baseball primarily ). With the NFL players doing what they can to offend and drive away their base, I wonder if we'll see a dramatic acceleration from this quarter forward as more people realize that spending 100+ bucks a month just to get sports is a waste of cash.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Why are they calling satellite and cable TV "traditional"? Seems like free, over-the-air broadcast is traditional TV.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Streaming "locally" may not be a cost effective solution.
Besides, are you paying for less, in that being a local 24 hour stream? Or paying for "Hulu" merged with local programming for a higher price than Hulu? Does the price of Internet+Hulu compare to traditional cable subscriptions?
My local networks have small scale streaming options for locally created content, ones which usually get overloaded during unscheduled major events like Tornadoes or Hurricanes. Occasionally even during scheduled ones like elections or New Year's eve, etc. Many local non-station affiliated content providers also have their own streaming options (churches on YouTube for the main example.)
Another problem is consumer traffic. Is it simpler to order cable service from a different time zone, and have to drive miles to exchange a cable box? Or is it better to do business with a service in the local area? -- Switching to the internet, is it easier to do business with a large mainstream site, or with some "huffingtoncountytelcosteaming.net" service provider with a smaller selection of content? Local cable companies are going to be reduced to internet providers, the future of which appears to be LTE at 10mbps. Which means cable companies will primarily exist to support cellular infrastructure, in more remote areas.
Literally the only reason they want people to bundle is so they can tell investors that the cable and phone portions of their business isn't tanking. It's anti-consumer and dishonest. Fuck'em.
I agree with this, but they really can't cut their price in half. Disney and co are too greedy to allow that to happen. Yes, the bulk of the cost you see from a cable provider is the cost of the content from the content provider, which is basically Time Warner, Disney, NBC Universal, and then the various regional networks. Why do you think ATT is buying Time Warner in the first place? Sure it makes them money, but more importantly, it converts a former cost into a revenue stream.
When you are the publisher, the leach, the middle man, the parasite (when publishers were printers or broadcasters it was different), you will have right to nothing in the digital era, everyone will be publishing direct and if you want to collate that publishing, you will have to provide real services to justify any payment and not take 30% for attacking direct publishing, obstructing broadband, corporate cartels censoring non-'publisher' controlled content, using claims to piracy to shut down competitors, most egregious example false DMCA complaints without any penalty basically corruption from the top down.
News and journalism is entirely different and there is a real definitive financially sound model to take them into the future and clean up the news, just not the time yet.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Get an antenna. I just bought a new house out in the boonies and it made me take a long hard look at cable. At the old house I was paying $220 a month for tv and internet. I never really paid attention to the bill and was a bit shocked to see how much it was. At most I was watching 10 channels. More and more I was watching Amazon.
I did a little research and ended up buying a Mohu Leaf antenna. $18 at WalMart. Damned if that thing isn't picking up about 40 channels. Now granted, some of them are shopping channels, some are religious, some are spanish but I'm getting all the local channels and the picture is fantastic. What my research also led me to understand is the the satellite and cable companies compress the signal so they can fit more data in their pipe. So 1080 doesn't really mean 1080. If you want to really see what 1080 resolution looks like get one of those antennas and you will immediately see how much sharper the picture is.
Then i have Amazon video, which I consider a freebee since I got Prime mainly for the shipping savings. That has plenty of stuff worth watching. I stumbled across something called Pluto tv. It's an app on Roku with free tv and movies. It has commercials but so does cable - and I'm not paying anything for Pluto.
I'm debating on getting Netflix again but probably won't. I have enough stuff to watch. And I'm saving about $150/month in the process. Life is good. The cable companies can go get stuffed.
They tried something different in Canada, offered a barebones cheap minimum package for low income then can add channels as needed. Boasted how great it was. The only problem was, the channels you got in the basic package were the ones nobody wanted and by the time you added the 5 channels you do want, it cost more than a package.
I have been able to write essentially this same comment every year since cable hit is peak six years ago.
Cable companies are monopolies and behave exactly like all monopolies. They charge every customer extra as rent just because they can. And when customers start rebelling and refusing to sign up or cut service they have, even though they have no competitor cable companies to buy service from, the thought that maybe they should lower prices or provide better service will never cross their minds, ever.
Instead the focus of cable companies is to increase profits by sweetheart legislation that maintains their monopoly control of broadband access, and turn that into a cash cow by stripping away net neutrality so that it can become a perpetual toll booth collecting rents.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj