Slashdot Mirror
Cord Cutting Accelerates as Pay TV Loses 1 Million Customers in Largest-Ever Quarterly Loss (usatoday.com)
Cable and satellite TV providers lost about 1.1 million subscribers during the July to September period, the largest quarterly loss ever -- and the first time the industry lost more than 1 million subscribers in a quarter, according to media and telecommunications research firm MoffettNathanson. From a report: After Dish Network reported its third-quarter earnings this week, the New York-headquartered research firm tallied up the publicly reported subscriber losses to arrive at the finding. Dish lost 341,000 subscribers in the third quarter, compared to adding 16,000 in the same period a year ago. Overall, Dish lost 367,000 satellite subscribers but added 26,000 Sling TV subscribers, the company said. Rich Greenfield, a media and technology analyst with financial services firm BTIG in New York, arrived at a similar conclusion and called it "the third-worst quarter in industry history and worst since Q2 2016."
I have never heard of this device. Someone explain?
metered. I managed to get a deal on "business" class for $100/mo to go unmetered, but eventually they'll get wise to that and I'll have to pay $140+/mo.
They're well aware we're cutting the cords. If anything they like it. Right now they have to pay each and every channel to run them. With cord cutters I pay $100+/mo for the line and then $70/mo for all my services. Worst case they break even and best case best case they come out ahead. Internet is cheap to provide.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Once GoT is done I'm removing all the pay channels from my service. Most all the programming has turned to shit.
As long as the telcos or cable tv companies control access it's going to be painful. It's going to have happen OTA/WIFI/magic, I dunno.
greedy bastards..
-db
the main reason i still have cable tv is not for the cable tv, but so i can access all the channels online streaming from my computer. if i was to cancel my 25/mo cable tv package i'd have to pay 10 channels 5-7 dollars a month. so i'm saving money still.
I mean, between HDTV antennas pulling down 150 channels free and free wireless in almost every business, why would you pay for cable?
And if you set the Second Audio Channel to English for the Spanish broadcasts, you get English subtitles on all the soccer and football and baseball games. They even have free radio apps for English language simulcast.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Forget the ever rising cost of the TV service itself, it's the service fees and mandatory hardware that are the real killer. If I want to add TV to my internet it's over $40 a month more just for the mandatory router, box for the TV, and broadcast/sports/etc fees before they even tack on the charge for the TV service itself! A bunch of people here signed up for the '79.99' service when FiOS first came into the building, only to discover their bills are actually $120 with the rentals/fees tacked on.
Sad because where I live for half the year, the cable service is also the only option for actual broadband. Spectrum really SUCKS. Currently I travel with my Dish service and use my internet access to watch my sports, which generally all I care about anyways.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
So what. (The link goes to the relevant part, but if you don't know the video, watch it all.)
This is due to content owners asking too much and cable companies nickel and dime-ing everyone. Raising prices every year for eternity without providing anything more is bunk. I hope they have a slow painful death.
plastic seats at the bus station with a TV built in and 25 cents for 30 minutes. That's $5.00 an hour today. Cable/Satellite are good deals. Subscribe TO-DAY for all you can eat and be one of the beautiful people.
After decades of being a cable and satellite TV subscriber -- most recently Dish -- I finally dumped Dish this summer, when their bill reached almost a hundred bucks a month, and I watched, at most, two or three channels every once in a while.
I would've happily paid $20-$30 a month for channels I occasionally watch. And although I could still afford the franklin every month, I really hate wasting money for nothing.
So now I effectively pay three bucks a month for a VPN, and can find acceptable substitutes from, ...err, slightly shady parts of the Internet, any time I want. I even have pretty good luck watching my favorite sports team after a five year break when Dish dropped my regional sports network. I was already paying for my DSL, and although it's not as speedy as cable, it's ...not cable. And I'm saving a grand a year.
Cable and satellite providers are in a death spiral. They keep raising rates, because of the shrinking customer base. Which only forces more customers to flee.
And let's not forget the unexpected results from the cutover to digital OTA TV. I believe that the cable companies really screwed the pooch by not realizing the impact of digital TV will have on their business. One thing I did was pick up a cheap HDTV antenna from Wally World, and 30 miles from the city it can pick up all but two local channels (that was mostly an academic purchase, out of curiosity, since there's not really much to watch anyway). Both of my neighbors also have an HD antenna stuck to their windows. Many of my acquaintances in the city also dropped cable, and simply attached an HD antenna, and get their local channels in crystal clear HD OTA, and resort to Kodi+VPN for the rest.
Been meaning to call my Cable provider and tell them I don't need cable TV anymore, just internet since I'm pretty much 100% Netflix. Called as soon as I saw this headline.
I'm tired of the annual "why has my bill gone up", only to be told that my discount from last year has expired.
In the process of cancelling they've told me my two home phones will go up by $5 each, and I told them to stuff their discount because I was tired of having to call every year to get it, and if they won't have honest up-front pricing, I don't want to play that game.
The way they tie these things into bundles amounted to the extortion of "well, if you cancel your TV you'll lose your discounts" ... great, last month the discount was $10, you've slapped another $10 onto my two phones, and I'm still net $40 less on my monthly bill.
Cable companies are assholes, and go out of their way to make it look like you're getting savings, but at the end of the day, you aren't.
I'm officially done with cable TV, and will likely stay that way. At some point I'll need to assess if having two land lines is working for me and the wife (cell coverage in our area sucks, and we both occasionally work from home), but for now at least the cable is done with.
It's using the media to send an SOS. The shitastic 'weirdness' is an SOS signal, track it down to its source.
Whenever I get multiple mail in a week for all the satellite people I know their business is suffering. Never been a Direct TV customer but Dish was a OK service a decade ago, today I wouldn't consider such a service. I use a antenna for my local channels which provides me with great HD signal, and stream the rest of what I watch. Cable broadband with Comcast is fine, occasionally I get a deal where broadband cheaper with a basic TV package. I take those deals, but never use the TV service.
What do you call it when you cancel Netflix / Amazon Prime?
Prices where they are these days it's easier to setup your own media library at home.
Discretionary income after food, living costs, tax can't go as far as it once did in the past?
People are getting bored with all the content?
The extra political content in new shows is getting to be less fun?
The quality of plot creation is now so low other types of entertainment get the spending?
Different streaming media is now more fun from the internet?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I am paying $100 a month for basic+ cable and another $100 for Internet.
Cable companies can't die fast enough.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
A good chunk of people still getting cable is to get Sports channels. If you're paying for just basic cable, a huge chunk of that monthly fee goes towards subsidizing channels such as ESPN, whether or not you choose to - because you have no choice but to have that included as part of the package.
Maybe people are starting to get sick of these sports channels becoming nothing but a 24/7 infomercial marketing Lebron James, Patriots, Duke and more Lebron James, followed by even more Lebron James.
They're even worse than Fox News.
But then again, there are people that would throw money away and "invest" their time into watching both of these worthless channels.
At $125 for cable TV and Internet I just won't bother.
After it went over $200/Mo I dumped everything but the internet access.
I don't see anyway they could get me to go back.
imagine paying any price to watch youtube and still getting 7 minute of ads for every 30 minutes you watch. do that and you have cable. cable is dying because the product is crap
Cable television providers (including all flavors of signal transmission) had this coming. They are the taxi cab industry that abused customers for years.
In case you haven't been following the news on this, at the same time that some cable networks have been folding in the last couple of years, new over the air broadcast networks and channels have been appearing.
Sure, it varies by local broadcast market, but look for this to accelerate and expand as ATSC 3.0 rolls out. The growth of streaming will also accelerate with the roll out of 5G.
Expect major changes in the TV industry over the next 5 years.
Cable sucks. At one point, you could mindlessly flip through channels till you found something that sparked your interest. That no longer works since each channel take so long to load. Channels also got greedy. They applied for and received layers of subchannels which were subsequently filled with inane crap nobody wanted but were forced to purchase because the desirable content keeps being locked away further and further up the chain. End result: Hundreds of channels that are utter crap blocking you from the few shows of interest.
For anyone out there who hasn't got the newsflash: OTA digital works great. You get your local channels for free and there's a good chance that the picture quality is better than cable. You can build your own OTA antenna, (instructions all over the internet) or just buy one from the dollar store. If you're feeling particularly rich, Best Buy has them for anywhere from $20-$100. Even if you have no intention of cancelling cable, you should still get one for those times the cable is out.
"see subject".
... the side-effects of pharmaceutical commercials!
I spend $34.99 per month on my internet access and I stream like mad.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
You're utterly naive if you believe that shit.
You know what happens every time the next gen of telecommunications comes out? There's splashy commercials promising the fastest network ever to download the shiniest things. Smiling people doing things you wish you could, all of which require prohibitive amounts of data they can't really deliver.
The problem is the don't want you (indeed can't afford for you) to actually be able to use that speed without doubling your bill or throttling you. Because you're going to push 4 times more data through their network they've been refusing to upgrade for years.
They won't build it in except the densest areas, outside of that it will be crap, and using it to stream the latest 64K video will bust your data cap.
5G will be a marketing gimmick like everything before it. And like everything before it, it is going to utterly fail to live up to what is being promised, and for the privilege, they will jack up your rates again.
If you're sitting around all pie eyed thinking "golly gee, my cellphone nirvana will happen when 5G happens" ... boy are you gonna be disappointed.
It's all a lie.
I had DirecTV many years ago. I paid them a lot of money. At that time HDTV was new, and it cost a lot both for the HDTV receivers, and extra for the HDTV service. But unlike other people, I rarely had any problems with signal interference, during storms, etc. So basically I was happy with the service.
After I sold my house and moved into an apartment, I was facing north so I could no longer get satellite TV. Yet, DirecTV still kept bombarding me with advertisements in the mail, even to my new address. I called them several times to stop the ads. One DirecTV rep even told me it wasn't their responsibility for the ads being sent, but rather it was THE POST OFFICE'S FAULT!
After another move or two, the incessant DirecTV ads finally stopped. I vowed never to get DirecTV again. And I actually liked their service.
This has been a long time coming and its just going to get worse for them. The price gouging and service fees, paying $120 a year for a control box that costs 5 bucks in hardware, 90% of the 150+ channels get are crap and you have still pay for "premium" movie channels...why would anyone be interested in paying for cable if you have an internet connections at this point unless you had too go through them?