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Cord-Cutting in America May Have Already Peaked (fool.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Motley Fool:
Cord-cutting has been a massive thorn in the side of pay-TV distributors and television media companies for nearly a decade. After U.S. pay-TV subscribers peaked in 2010 at 105 million households, about 14 million homes have cut the cord, according to a report from Digital TV Research. The trend has only accelerated in recent years. 2018 saw nearly double the amount of cord-cutting over 2017, according to Leichtman Research.
But 2018 might've been the pay-TV industry's worst year for cord-cutting. The U.S. will lose fewer pay-TV subscribers this year than last, according to Digital TV Research. And the research firm suggests annual losses will continue to decline next decade.
But 2018 might've been the pay-TV industry's worst year for cord-cutting. The U.S. will lose fewer pay-TV subscribers this year than last, according to Digital TV Research. And the research firm suggests annual losses will continue to decline next decade.
"The U.S. will lose fewer pay-TV subscribers this year than last, according to Digital TV Research. And the research firm suggests annual losses will continue to decline next decade."
Right. If you have a million customers and you lose half of them one year, indeed the losses you experience the next year from the half million remaining cannot exceed the half million you already lost since you only have half a million left. I know that's vastly oversimplifying the issue, but indeed if you have a smaller pool of customers and that pool shrinks each year, statistically you're going to suffer fewer losses. Less people to cancel plus the more you lose you come closer and closer to finding your solid "base" that make up your truly loyal customers--for better or worse.
Whether this base of loyal customers is enough to keep the sinking ship from sinking faster? Well, that's yet to be seen.
The cable companies saw the writing on the wall and increased Internet prices to make up some of the difference.
And with all the new, separate streaming services programming has gotten fragmented and aggregators like Netflix are losing content left and right that all these companies want to keep exclusive to their own streaming services which leads to the al a carte people said they wanted, but also leads to death due to bloodloss from a thousand smaller cuts
People can get "something" a la carte, but I don't think that "something" is quite what they wanted. The preferred a la carte approach was meant to be that you go to single provider (whether that's cable like Comcast, or online like Netflix doesn't matter), tick all the channels/shows on their menu that you want to subscribe to (or pay as you go per movie/episode, again, doesn't matter) and you have everything you want. One supplier, one bill, all the shows you want, and - most importantly - none of the ones you don't just because they happen to be part of a bundle. As a bonus, if that could be without having to endure any more ads than strictly necessary to keep the shows in production as well, so much the better.
I don't see this fragmentation is going to last. It's death by a thousand financial cuts; there's no way I'm going to subscribe to a service for a single show; I'll get that from torrents, and I suspect I'll not be alone once more people realise how much it's costing them for all their various subscriptions. That's going to make it very difficult for smaller providers with only a few shows so I expect cross-licensing to start appearing soon enabling the larger players like Netflix or Amazon Prime to provide shows for people that don't want any of the CSI shows but do want the new Trek, for instance. Better for CBS to have a slightly smaller slice of the pie than no slice at all because enough a viewers decided they'll just torrent the one CBS show they want.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!