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Sorry Deniers, Data Shows Cord Cutting is Slow, But Very Real
by Karl Bode
Monday May 11 2015 15:37 EDT

The pay TV saw a net decline in overall customers for the first time ever, according to new analysis by MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett. According to Moffett's analysis, the pay TV sector is losing customers at around an 0.5% annual rate, with a net loss of 31,000 customers last quarter. Those aren't hysteria-inducing numbers, but neither are they good news for industry executives that have historically pretended that cord cutting isn't real.

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While cable operators have been bleeding customers heavily, satellite providers had for a while been resilient to the downturn, something Dish's latest earnings show is no longer the case.

Ironically, Moffett used to be one of the biggest cord cutting deniers in the industry, but one day realized that not only were pay TV providers bleeding users, new houses being built weren't signing up for cable either:

quote:
"To investors, the question of whether all that licensing of content to Netflix and Hulu and other online venues would hurt or help the pay-TV ecosystem seems painfully quaint (of course it will hurt),” Moffett wrote. The decline in Q1 2015 comes after about 1.4 million households over the course of 2014 either canceled existing pay-TV service or were new households that didn’t sign up at all, according to Moffett’s analysis.
And this is just looking at subscriber totals, if you look at broadcast ratings things get notably worse. Moffet's partner Michael Nathanson last month noted that Netflix now represents close to 6 percent of total TV viewing in the United States, and contributed to 43 percent of the ratings decline the networks experienced last quarter. Perhaps we need to get rid of the term "cord cutters" and just replace it with "smarter shoppers."

Of course legacy cable TV's massive audience, combined with the slow rate of defections, means the cable industry has plenty of time to get out ahead of Internet video before it really starts to hurt. But 2015 is bearing witness to a much larger variety of over the top options (whether that's from SlingTV, Sony, Verizon or Apple), and as the trend accelerates most of the industry's top executives will have much less time to adapt then they'd like to believe.

tags: prices · satellite · Video · competition · business · alternatives · cable · telco · stats · bundles · content · consumers · caps · Apple · Dish · HBO · cordcutters

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gigahurtz
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Palm Coast, FL
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·Bright House Net..

gigahurtz

Premium Member

2015-May-11 3:51 pm

I cut the cord and haven't looked back.

For years and years, I paid my cable company each and every month for TV, phone and internet service because.. well that's just what you do. My wife had her 'shows' she watched, I watched about two channels and overall we were just accustomed to having TV service.

Over time, we found ourselves watching Netflix more often than anything. We turned the cable TV on just to have it on. Earlier this year, I decided to cut the cord for our TV and phone service and we haven't looked back. We subscribe to Hulu and Netflix as well as Amazon Prime (which we already had). I found CBSN on my Roku if we ever wanted to 'watch the news'. The Roku streaming channel store offers such a wide variety of content I really can't imagine having anything else.

We are saving close to $100/mo from what we were paying and we could save a lot more if Brighthouse wasn't so expensive with their internet only plans

My advice to anyone considering cutting the cord is to just do it. Netflix and Hulu provide so much content that most will be content with just those. You will also find yourself getting involved in many other hobbies and activities you didn't have time for before when you were glued to your TV.
· actions · 2015-May-11 3:51 pm ·

How about ..