Cable companies freak out after 1 million cut cord in 3 months
Cord-cutting, or at least the speed at which people are ditching pay TV, is on track to be the biggest upset of the year. There’s finally a collection of cheap-ish streaming services widely available, and as you’d imagine, people are jumping ship from cable as fast as humanly possible. The latest bad data points come from the Q3 earnings of all the big cable companies, which are mostly now public. DSLReports added up the damage, and it makes for bad reading if you’re a cable company exec.
“Only five of the seven biggest pay-TV providers have released their third-quarter subscriber data, but collectively these companies saw a net loss of 632,000 pay-TV subscribers during the period (385,000 for AT&T and DirecTV, 125,000 for Comcast, 104,000 for Charter, 18.000 for Verizon FiOS TV),” DSL wrote. When you add in the un-reported numbers from Dish and Altice, that number will be near-as-makes-no-difference 1 million.
To put that in perspective, a survey suggested last year that there were around 16 million cord-cutters in the US. Adding another million to that in Q3 alone shows just how fast the industry is changing.
Cable TV companies are struggling to adapt. AT&T is a prime example: The company has successfully launched DirecTV Now, one of the better internet-only streaming services. But the base package is $40, way less than the $100 that families traditionally spend on a cable bundle. Worse, AT&T is currently giving away DirecTV Now for $10 to wireless subscribers, meaning it’s not making them any real money at the moment.
Fundamentally, the market is transitioning from a series of regional monopolies to a competitive national market. You can already buy streaming TV from AT&T, YouTube, Hulu, Fubo, or Sling, and those services are available in most markets nationwide. It’s no coincidence that $40 a month is the standard price for around 50 channels — that’s about what it costs to sell the service, plus minor overheads for technology and customer service. Streaming TV is going to mean cheaper TV, which is fantastic and long overdue for consumers, but awful for the bottom line of cable TV providers.
(I cut the cord months ago and am relying on Hulu. The only thing you need regular cable is for sports. Now that I have abandoned the NFL and the NBA and listen to baseball on the radio I don't give a shit about regular cable. I can get tons of old westerns on Youtube. With a Smart TV you can watch it on the big screen. So you don't need cable at all.
Tip for you. Amazon Prime Video has several channels you can buy to stream for about five bucks a month. I have the Faith and Family channel which has a bunch of great movies that don't have any gore or degradation like your normal movies. Now i have subscribed to Acorn TV which has a bunch of British shows, The full schedule for shows like Doc Martin and some really cool police procedurals that are far superior to the dreck on mainstream cable.
The NFL has screwed the pooch for the cable companies. They should be the ones smacking around Goodell not the Pizza guy. They are losing them millions. Soon billions.
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.)
3 comments:
Saw this elsewhere (Breitbart, I think), so it's making the rounds.
Take all the kneeling, toss in Spacey, add some Maher, and season with fake news, and, yeah, people looking to save a couple of bucks know exactly where to economize.
Good for you. Cut the cord too. Others in my family are streaming TV shows over the net.
I'm astounded more people aren't cutting out Comcast - they fucking suck and they always have.
Colon Kaepernick let loose and poo'd the scrooch.
He who knelt it dealt it. He should take majority responsibility.
Post a Comment