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ABC’s Daisy Whitney (New Media Minute) went in search for evidence that Americans really are fed up with their cable TV bill and are cutting the cord. She collided head-on with an industry still in denial that consumers are fed up with high cable bills and relying on their home broadband connection for video entertainment.
Nielsen reports there are 5.1 million homes in the U.S. that have broadband-only service from their provider, and presumably rely on over-the-air TV for live televised events. That’s up a huge 23 percent over last year. But some analysts dismiss that as growth that comes from homes that never had broadband in the first place, a conclusion that needs more evidence to back it up.
Providers admit most of their new customers are coming from other broadband providers, especially as Americans dump slow DSL in favor of faster cable or fiber-delivered service. In most areas, those who want broadband service already have it. The primary exception: rural residents just accessing newly-available broadband for the first time.
For 20 years, the cable industry has enjoyed a growth in video subscribers. That is no longer the case. While the numbers are not staggering, hundreds of thousands of big cable customers are dropping their cable TV subscriptions every quarter, and they don’t seem to be taking their business to the competition. Granted, many cancellations are income-related, especially among video-only customers, but it is clear a ceiling has been reached on what Americans will tolerate from the cable company.
With programming rate increases continuing unabated, that bill is only going up.
[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/ABC Quitting Cable TV Truth or Lie 2-22-12.m4v[/flv]
Daisy Whitney’s New Media Minute explores cord cutting. (2 minutes)
They aren’t in denial about this at all. They just publicly deny it to save face. It is plainly obvious that this is their real motivation for monthly “caps” on how much we can use our Internet connections. I have Centurylink and just found out about this accidentally a few hours ago when I became suspicious that Centurylink was blocking a political web site even though the “Down or Just Me” site said it was up. A Google search brought me to the page that mentioned their cap. Centurylink exempts uploading from their cap because they know that Bittorrent users… Read more »
So far as cable TV goes, it’s not just about the money. It’s about quality, and an industry that has been slowly boiling it’s own frog for the last 20 years. Back in the 1970s there still were people who listened to new music. But then there was arena rock, and disco, and pop music burned out around the summer of 1983 — Michael Jackson was the last musician who was popular among both blacks and whites. After that, pop music fragmented into a number of sub-genres, none of which is all that popular. I quit listening to new music… Read more »
We cut the cord a few years ago because the prices for cable are just getting astronomical. Also another thing that has irked me,is the move towards getting rid of peoples ability to record programs with their own equipment. They make you rent these boxes and restrict what you can do with the content unlike back in the day when you recorded it and burnt it onto a DVD or copied it to a VHS tape. Anyway I get most of my content from Usenet, commercial free and in HD. Until the content providers come up with a plan that… Read more »
“Anyway I get most of my content from Usenet, commercial free and in HD.”
Of course if everyone did this there would be no content for you to steal.
Hob
But you have all of those sheep out there that will believe anything MSM will say so that won’t ever happen. Also isn’t it nice that the content providers and cable co’s have been slowly eroding away our choice over the years? Gotta love that freedom there…