While it's clear that cord cutting remains a small threat to a statistically dominant cable industry, there's still a very clear shift afoot. Still, most broadcasters and cable companies are eager to downplay the idea that users could eventually begin dropping pricey cable service in exchange for less expensive and more a-la-carte-centric Internet video options. ESPN in particular seems very excited to highlight just how small they believe the risk is, issuing a report last December insisting that just 0.11% of cable households had cut the cord -- and now this week issuing yet another story insisting the cord cutting is just a meaningless blip:

quote:

---

Just 18/100ths (of one percent) of US households "cut the cord" between fourth quarter 2010 and first quarter 2011, according to ESPN analysis of Nielsen households. This study defines "cord-cutters" as multichannel homes with a high-speed Internet connection that drop their cable/telco/satellite subscriptions, but retain their broadband connection to watch television. The current rate of 0.18 percent is less than the 0.28 percent found in ESPN’s previous analysis of cord-cutting from third to fourth Quarter 2010.

---

As outfits like Convergence consulting told us last year, the rise of Internet video isn't a short-term story -- but a very glacially paced rise. Most of cable's losses of late have been to competitors like telcoTV, and SNL Kagan released data this week noting that TV operators gained 65,000 new subscribers in the fourth quarter -- after two consecutive quarterly declines. However ESPN shouldn't get too comfortable just yet -- given that according to data from Stifel Nicolas, the percentage of households that pay for TV declined in 2010 as the cable industry's two biggest bogeymen for subscriber losses (housing, digital transition) stopped being as much of a factor:

quote:

---

But the decline of the pay TV market is being helped along by high unemployment, higher food and transportation bills, and cheaper, if less convenient alternatives than traditional cable or satellite. King notes that at the same time pay TV subscriptions languished, Netflix added 2.4 million paying subscribers in the fourth quarter and 6.4 million subscribers throughout 2010. With 18.3 million people paying for its service, it would be the third-largest pay TV service behind Comcast and DirecTV.

---

So while you'll hear a lot of rhetoric from the cable industry that the very idea of a "cord cutter" is some kind of ridiculous hallucination, the ongoing shift that's occurring is very real, and this is all a story very much unwritten. ESPN can take some comfort in the fact that there's very few options for legal, live sports streams via broadband at the moment, but it's probably premature to pop the bubbly just yet.