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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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Should just remove it now and use a pay-for-play on demand TV app. You can get GoT for about $3/episode or $23 for a whole season as soon as it airs. Or just use HBO itself.
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.
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! --
Then vote politicians in office that put that last mile under state or municipal control. So that people can be wired up @ reasonable prices. Then make the commercial competition a thing of what happens on the other end, on those wires. Infrastructure under people's control, content provided over that infrastructure = competition among commercial parties.
Oh US... politics crazy, you're fucked LOL
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.
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.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
Ya might wanna google "Natural Monopoly" before thinking you can deregulate your way out of the last mile problem.
Oh US... politics crazy, you're fucked LOL
It's not the elected, it's the electorate. Well, OK; it's both. Top voter issues are the economy and healthcare, not necessarily in that order. TV and Internet access doesn't show up on any list of issues voters want addressed. If it did, politicians might be motivated to do something.
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.
Alwin was endorsing government ownership. That's far from deregulation.