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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."
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.
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.
Advertising is partly to blame.
Advertising kills every medium that it has ever come into contact with. And now the web too.
Just think about Cable TV. It's partly the cable channel's fault, and partly advertising.
Originally the premise of cable was that you wouldn't get ads because you were paying. Yeah, right.
But the ads weren't too long or too bad. Those were the daze.
By the 1990s at least the ads paid for good cable content. Good documentaries. Good entertainment. Etc.
Then came: Reality TV.
Reality TV is cheap to make. Entertaining, at first, purely because of shock value. But it gets old quick. If you don't watch Reality TV then your alternative is reruns of old cable TV content, and "marathons" of reruns.
Then the content got shorter and the ads got longer. Oh, and remember when the volume level of ads was twice that of the content?
Now you get all ads, punctuated by some content that is probably not worth watching, and then when the long string of ads are over, there are bugs, and animated characters crawling and walking out right over the top of the content you're trying to watch!
Gee, and they wonder why people are cutting the cable TV cord?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.