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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."
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.
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Once GoT is done I'm removing all the pay channels from my service. Most all the programming has turned to shit.
A TV is also known as a Boob Tube which you will usually find wrapped around the chest of various girls until you get them drunk enough to take them off.
I have never heard of this device. Someone explain?
Its like a really large tablet you hang on your wall. Multiple people can use it simultaneously.
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.
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.
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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.
Its like a really large tablet you hang on your wall. Multiple people can use it simultaneously.
But if you hang it on a wall, how do you move it around when you go to the bathroom or cook dinner?
And isn't the picture smaller than a tablet, considering how far away it is?
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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 ?
I'd like to see them bleed out of their ass, but they'll probably recoup any CableTV losses with their own Internet access.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
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.
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.
It's a thing you connect to your computer to display the computer's desktop or command line.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Sports seem to be the largest part of the problem. They overpay for broadcast rights, which means the costs get shoved down to the cable customers.
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.
Reading books. Mostly, paper ones.
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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.
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.
But if you hang it on a wall, how do you move it around when you go to the bathroom or cook dinner?
And isn't the picture smaller than a tablet, considering how far away it is?
Easy. You don't use a TV, you use a projector and throw a picture that's 7, 8, 10, 11, 12+ ft wide (not diagonal -- wide.) Go big, or don't go at all. 7 ft picture seen from 9 ft away is roughly the same as a a 50 ft picture seen from the prime seats in a moviehouse.
To get the same picture from a phone you'd have to be about 8 inches from the phone.
See? TVs are useless. Get a projector.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
But my phone is a projector
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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.
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.
I remember seeing one of those once at a Greyhound station. It looked horribly antiquated when I saw it 20 years ago.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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".
I do believe that this new technology called "broadcast television" may have a future.
They'd probably have more luck calling it "Wireless Streaming Video"... But who are we kidding, they'd call it "Free Unlimited Wireless Streaming Video with Wide Area Multi-Screen Synchronization (and sponsored content)". Watch what all your friends else is watching! At the same time!
Reality TV is cheap to make. Entertaining, at first, purely because of shock value.
My sister and I (both retired) share a home. She's hooked on TV shows about people buying and remodelling homes. Where's the shock value in that? She also loves holiday baking competitions on the Food Network; again, no shock. OK, I'll grant it that sometimes there's a bit of a shock on Chopped, or some similar show when somebody's eliminated that you didn't expect, but that's about it. I'm sure that there must be reality shows out there specializing in shock value, but that's not what we find entertaining, so we never watch any of them.
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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
If we paid to watch the ads, would the content come back? Seems reasonable like playing an MP3 backwards to summon Satan or something.
I find the touchscreen is really unresponsive on those things.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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?
Yeah, having been exposed to cable TV a couple times in the past year, after not having it myself since about 2004, it occurred to me that I wouldn't want it if it were free. The amount of commercials is insane... and I'm not so averse to commercials, because the commercials on the lowest tier of Hulu usually don't bug me. They are much shorter than the 3-minute break every 6 minutes you get on "regular TV". I tried watching a movie on broadcast a few years when travelling and turned it off after about 20 minutes... there was literally more ad-time than there was content... or it seemed that way. I grew up with regular ol' broadcast TV, and later cable, but now I can't stand it.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The text I quoted says that "Reality TV is entertaining at first, purely because of shock value." While I grant that this must be true in some cases, I was pointing out that there are many reality shows out there with zero shock value. Clearly, in your case, it's simply assuming that since you don't watch these shows, they must be terrible. You really need to expand your horizons and find out that there's more good stuff out there than you thought.
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If it's supposed to be like playing MP3s backwards, then how about THEY PAY US to maybe watch the ads?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.