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Another Million Subscribers Cut the Pay TV Cord Last Quarter (dslreports.com)
A report from FierceCable says that a million more U.S. pay TV subscribers cut the TV cord last quarter. "Only five of the seven biggest pay TV providers have released their third quarter subscriber data, but collectively these companies saw a net loss of 632,000 pay TV subscribers during the period (385,000 for AT&T and DirecTV, 125,000 for Comcast, 104,000 for Charter, 18.000 for Verizon FiOS TV)," reports DSLReports. "Dish has yet to report its own cord cutting tallies, but the company is again expected to be among the hardest hit due to a high level of retransmission fee feuds and a lack of broadband bundles."
They could avoid it if TV didn't suck.
EXCELLENT! I love it! I'll be doing it shortly too.
Cable bill..hey, cable TV...no commercials.... OK.. Broadband better than DSL ? OK. TV too, OK. Feed the whole house. CableCo scrambles all signals "for piracy". You need to rent a box for $8 per month per TV and suffer an egregious Guide. Three TV sets. Commercial load making any non DVR watching impossible. Send another new bill. Now, $7 per month "Sports Fee". Don't watch or subscribe to any sports. ESPN needs my money ? They are not even a government....so $8x3x12 + $7x12. = $374 You just boosted me a car payment for absolutely nothing ?
we cut last month. our TWC bill was doubled by Spectrum for the same service. watched the World Series online.
....says that if you lose market share you cut prices to try and regain it. They will no doubt raise prices to try and keep revenue the same...thus driving off even more customers.
Had Uverse for years, they kept trying to charge me $140/month. Every fricken year I called them and said "Um, yeah, no bang for the buck here" and got my monthly bill down to under $100. This year? They jacked my rate to $160/month, called them a few weeks ago and the best they could offer was $140. Um, how about no. Actually, how about "fuck no, you greedy assholes".
Lost my cable TV 2 days ago, we'll see how it goes, but I'm looking into Kodi boxes and DVDs from the library. I miss the news, the Chargers went to LA last year so fuck them, this will be interesting.
What was really irritating? AT&T was sending flyers to my house advertising the same package I had at $160 for $50/month if I got directTV. But I don't have a south facing place to put an antenna, plus I like online multiplayer games where ping matters. Cox was advertising the same package for $80/month. I decided to bite the bullet and cut the cord instead of getting a new DVR/install.
Thereâ(TM)s nothing to watch and the only reason most people kept it so long is forced bundling. Now the push is against that. How about donâ(TM)t make me watch 11 minutes of ads on a 25 year old sitcom rerun and pretend thatâ(TM)s a service worth paying for.
Cut the cord a year ago. Tablo streaming and DVR OTA TV to four screens and mobile devices. Playstation Vue for sports and Netflix. Haven't missed cable. Saving $1300/yr.
have cable, and with them pushing their SJW agenda rather than sports, of course they're turning-off people.
Also, WatchESPN is just garbage. At the chain of restaurants where I work, we have computers, mostly old Mac Minis, plugged into TVs, and our customers are pissed off at us about how bad it is. I last heard we were spending about $15k a month to get ESPN, and at the moment all we're doing is pissing off college football fans.
(Posting for the official record.)
It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: cable TV is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered cable TV community when Nielsen confirmed that cable TV market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all viewers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that cable TV has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. cable TV is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent cable TV viewers survey.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict cable TV's future. The hand writing is on the wall: cable TV faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for cable TV because cable TV is dying. Things are looking very bad for cable TV. As many of us are already aware, cable TV continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Due to the troubles of cable, abysmal sales and so on, cable has basically gone out of business and has been taken over by Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc who sell better TV for less.
All major surveys show that cable TV has steadily declined in market share. Cable TV is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If cable TV is to survive at all it will be among cable dilettante dabblers. Cable TV continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, cable TV is dead.
That crippling bombshell sent cable TV fans into a tailspin of mourning and denial. However, bad news poured in like a river of water.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Wow, no mention of Kodi in the article. It's usually their fault right?
1) Lack of anything meaningful to watch on it. I think every other station on DirecTV is either an infomercial, religious programming, or in a language I don't even speak. ( Spanish ) The culled down list of channels I flip through is maybe a dozen. Maybe.
2) Monthly cost of said programming far exceeds its value. Far, FAR too expensive for what it is. Cut the cost in half and you might slow the bleeding a bit. For a while anyway. You still need to fix #1 if you plan on having any long term customers.
You may be wondering why I even have the service if I bitch about the lack of programming and its cost. The ONLY reason I still have it is because I get a ludicrous discount on it. All channels sans premiums ( HBO, Max, etc ) costs less than my monthly Netflix account unless I decide to watch some pay per view movies.
I have said it outloud more than once: " There is no way I would ever pay full price for this. "
But FIOS made it very difficult for me, including "accidentally" disconnecting my telephone for two days.
Have you noticed your Internet bill going up lately? Cable / Phone companies don't care where they get their money as long as it keeps flowing in. If they raise the price of Internet access to $100 per month you will pay it.
What are you going to do, cut the cable modem too?
I guess there's local news, but most of the stations around here got bought out by Fox and aren't really local anymore. It's actually creepy to see their fox news style politics seeping into it...
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I dumped Comcast 5 months ago and couldn't be happier. They are the ONLY game in my town and they were charging me $175 2 years ago then it kept going up 1 years ago it was $199 and then they started dropping channels. 1 here 1 there, at first I worked around it but soon I noticed that the channels they were cutting were the ones I was watching. I only watched about 14 channels out of the so called 400 they were giving me. (note that includes all the digital music channels, the how to use your cable system better channels, and the Comcast Channels (basically a commercial for them all day long). I called and said over the last year you removed 6 of the channels I watch and I am paying $199 a month. They said for $25 more a month I could get back all the missing channels and they would add a whole bunch of garbage, some lame streaming thing, and all these shopping channels I never heard of, etc. etc. I said no and just kept complaining about the price. They dropped the price back to $175 a month which in my mind was way too high but it was down. A few months went by and then my bill was $224.99. I called and asked what happened, I was told I was put on a promo plan to get my rate down to $175 and it had expired. I was pissed. I said I was never informed of that, they said we even mailed it to me. I said I never got anything in the mail. After arguing on the phone with them for an hour trying to get the bill back to the $175, I broke down and said can I just get it to the $199 and I will somehow live with that. Nope that deal had passed. I hung up. About a month went and I got the new bill $275 a month. WTH!, WHF! I called them and they said the price of services had gone up. Same crap for about an hour on the phone with them. At that point I said no problem, I am done with you. Please cancel my service. Now that was the words to say now they were trying to help me. Wait NO! you don't want to leave us. Yes I do. Another hour of various sales pitches the only one that almost worked was to get all 4 services from them for $189 a month for a short time 6 months. I asked how much higher will it go after that, they did not want to tell me, after asking over and over and over they finally told me it would be $399 a month after that promo. I said no firmly and said drop the service I am done. Turned in my cable boxes the next day. This company is OUT of control, the pricing with no competition is unbelievable. The other problem that I noticed was that Comcast adds commercials. I did not know that but I guess for about the last 4 years they have been adding commercials. I found out because I had noticed that commercial breaks were 8 minutes long on a hour show and when I was watching the same show at my out of state friends house I noticed they had more content. There were parts cut out to make room for the commercials! ARE YOU F'N kidding me!. So I pay an outrageous price for cable TV and you add commercials and cut the shows content! WTH! I have had to go back and watch some of my favorite shows from the last year or so just to get all the missing parts. No wonder everyone is dropping TV. If Comcast would pull their head out of their ass and drop the price to about $50 a month (for all the channels) that is about all the garbage they proved is worth, people might keep cable TV. But still, I don't know if I could live with all the commercials. .....and aren't the commercials supposed to pay for the services!!! Oh, Yeah! they are double dipping.
Well get ready for a huge bill in about a year when suddenly you start to see surcharges on your ISP bill for netflix, hulu, amazon video, youtube, etc... Because this WILL happen. ISPs hate not getting a piece of the pie and nuking net neutrality means a-la-carte billing. Bend over cord-cutters. I'm looking into printed-paper books, seems like that will eventually be the only type of media that isn't surcharged up the ass per-view.
Been thinking of dropping TV and just getting Internet. I only watch sify and occasionally the History channel, but I admit Josh Gates has jumped the shark. Is the History Channel owned by Josh?
Logged on to comcast:
We're sorry, it looks like you'll need some help completing your order.
Please call us at 1-877-680-7173 and we can help.
Not looking forward to spending hours of mental combat with them.
Meh, just using streaming sites that cost nothing
Legal "streaming sites that cost nothing" lack cable-exclusive series. My roommate appears willing to pay hundreds of dollars a year for the live Rachel Maddow Show.
and we've got a monthly cost of only regular internets.
Unless you live in a city whose ISP has a "buy unmetered Internet, get TV free" policy. Some ISPs are known to impose a harsh "cap" (monthly Internet data transfer volume allowance) on Internet subscribers who don't also subscribe to the same company's multichannel pay TV service.
With all the cord cutting, myself included, I don't understand why more content providers aren't breaking with tradition (or contracts) and offering their programming via streaming. For example, I want my national news via my Roku box. I checked with Fox News (don't judge me) and the only way I can stream their content is with an account like DirecTV or one of the cable providers. It's a dying industry and content providers really need to either offer themselves al-a-cart or figure out a way to group together on their own. I won't be paying for 100 channels of infomercials or crap I don't watch anymore just to have news and weather. I am guessing most others commenting here feel the same.
"Gee, we only misused and abused our subscribers for decades, forced people to subsidize programming they have no interest whatsoever in, and exploited our illegal monopolies to suck trillions and trillions of dollars out of people who had no choice if they wanted decent and convenient entertainment options, and proved over and over again why situations without competition between service providers produce RECORD bad service and horrible customer value, WHY ARE THEY ALL CUTTING THE CORD NOW THAT THERE ARE ALTERNATIVES?!?"
I cut the cord YEARS ago, and never looked back. Screw the cable monopolies, they can suck my COAX CABLE.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Back in the day when we had 6ish TV channels and no internet, cable tv was nice. If only for the fact we could get those 6ish channels with perfect reception. Those other channels offered was a bonus. Although really they mostly sucked. MTV was good for videos but they don't do that anymore. I don't even think ESPN was born yet.
I now pay $100 for a fast internet package. The cable company is annoyingly incessant sending me mail asking me to buy TV package. $300 gift card if I sign up for a 2 year deal. When are they going to realize cable TV sucks and should be dead?
Life is Grand!
In the six or so years since I cut the cord, Cox has raised my internet rate from a somewhat reasonable $55 to a ridiculous $79 with no significant increase in bandwidth.
Piracy is the solution. Simply pirate until they offer a serious service. This keeps the money away from them (so they will be constantly "punished" until they open for business) and also allows things to be set right once they alter their behavior.
Money is really key on this. It's very important that people withhold it until they get what they want. People say "they'll never offer something useful," and your reply should be "I'll never pay them another cent until they do."
If you're paying, then you're not pressuring.
If you're paying, you're saying "yes, I love this! Thank you! Let's do this again next month!" Every month, it's like you filled out a customer satisfaction survey, where you rated them 5 stars out of 5.
If you're paying, you're the problem. You're voting-with-your-wallet for it to suck.
If your friends are paying, you should try to help them stop. Piracy has never been easier, and we need to teach everyone how to do it. Your mom. Your kid's teacher. Your neighbors. Your cow-orkers. Cable might be losing customers, but it's not nearly enough. The stockholders need to be losing money and getting mad at the CEO. Ceasing to be a customer is the very best way to help.
Pirate, and either educate or shame those who still (?!!) don't.
...I still have cable is because of my wife and kids who watch specific things. I don't watch sports, and I loathe to watch any other shows thanks to the high commercial-to-content ratio and ridiculously low-brow shows. I would absolutely cut the cord if I could. These days I watch YouTube like TV because now there's so much high-quality content that fits my particular interests! Combine that with Netflix, and there's never a need to go back the anachronism of "cable TV".
Antennas work - bitches!
I'm 35 miles from the main hill with all the TV broadcast crap on it.
Getting almost 80 channels - 20-ish are good. The rest are religious wackos, shopping, radio stations and so low quality they aren't worth watching. There's 1 broadcaster putting about 20 video feeds AND 20 radio feeds on their single 20Mbps channel.
There are some places where an antenna doesn't work, but if you are within 100 miles of a broadcast tower, $150 might get you TV. That's a 1-time cost.