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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.
Honestly, when pay-TV refers to the old pay-TV companies and exclude new pay-TV companies, like Netflix and Hulu, then this way to count customers is bonkers. This is like when you have one bakery in a town which sells all the bread and you count how much bread and rolls they sell. Then a new second bakery opens, but you still count only the products from the first bakery. Suddenly people by less bread. And before you tell me that Netflix is not pay-TV. It is you watch it and you pay for it. Yes it is not linear and there is no classic programming. So what? It is just the modern form of pay-TV.
The cable industry lost four quarts of blood over the last two years but next year they're only going to lose another pint.
Wooo! Pop the champagne.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
My 74 year old mother just cut the cord from AT&T/DirecTV to playstation vue. No she doesn't have a playstation. anyway her cost dropped from 125/mnth to 60/mnth. That was the driver for her to switch. If the AT&Ts and Comcasts of the world keep gouging people then the exodus will continue. I guess I should follow her lead and drop DirecTV also but i haggle with them every 6 months to year to keep my price down to $64/mnth so I guess it's no rush. She was done with the haggling and just had enough. she still struggles to use the app and chromecast but she's determined stick to the man so she's getting the hang of it.
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
I was out to eat the other day when I overheard a lady complaining about her cable bill approaching $200. A person at another table told her to dump her cable TV package in favor of Hulu. A person at a 3rd table recommended YouTube TV.
Cable cutting is about to become A LOT more common.
People asked for All La Carte TV... now they can get it. Let's see if they enjoy it as much as they thought they would.
Except this isn't A la carte
What I wanted back then was a la carte pricing and selection from my cable tv provider. I didn't want to pay $150/month for a package with, e.g. BBCAmerica with a mandatory ESPN that I knew was adding $30/month to the package.
But ESPN had cut a side deal with Comcast and there was no package with BBCAmerican without ESPN.
You can try to redefine what a la carte meant. But AFAIC this isn't a la carte.
With the end of Net Neutrality (hopefully not permanently), your Xfinity cable internet service could decide that you don't get access to Disney and ESPN through streaming; your U-Verse service could decide not to let you stream Sling (owned by Dish Network) and so on.
If an of the big ISPs cut off Netflix or Amazon, there'd be riots in the street, but the smaller players may get cut out if Net Neutrality isn't restored.
Any why doesn't everyone do what I did and turn a $100 DirecTV bill (no premium channels, DVR, HD) into a $30 Sling bill (ditto)? Laziness. It's easy to keep that autobill payment on your credit card, it's hard to empty out a DVR.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Ironically the cord cutting generation will still spend countless hours mindlessly consuming streamed content. They're just doing it on a different device, or paying a different provider.
Just because we call the Boob Tube a "smartphone" these days doesn't make the consumers any smarter or less addicted.
That is not at issue. The real irony is that the entrenched industry has managed to alienate their entire customer base and generally price themselves out of the market in the search for greater growth in profits. They have no idea what the true value proposition is for their own product. Growth in a mature market where most of the public is a customer can only be obtained by raising revenue through pricing per customer. They have made too many trips to the well and now the well is running dry.
Sure. Netflix and YouTube are substitutes, but cable TV is declining because their business model is failing. Cable use to be a "must have" utility that you called upon move-in just like electric or trash service. Now it's a "nobody wants." As mind share dwindles, the hive effect diminishes too.
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!
Cutting production costs to switch to reality TV means greater profits. Until nobody is paying for it, that is.
If you are subscribing to all these services are you really cutting the cord? Seems to me all you are doing is sending your money to just different services. I subscribe to 3 services, Coursitystream, Netflix, and Hulu. I'm also watching more Youtube channels now. If it isn't on those services I probably will not watch it.
My daughter added a philo subscription. Adding all that up it is still cheaper than what I was paying for with cable.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Most people get internet through a wire attached to their residence. Usually it's the very same coax cable that brings in cable TV, and often from the same cable company.
They're not cutting any cords. They are just switching what company is sending their feed through the cord.
(And, amusingly, people who get television by subscribing to DirectTV, which literally does NOT have a cord, but comes in over the satellite dish... are not cord-cutters.)