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."

Comments

Re:Content Owner Suicide

[DickBreath]

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?