400,000 American homes have dumped pay-TV so far this year

http://www.bgr.com/2012/08/02/cable-tv-subscriber-stats-q2-2012-satellite/

by kemper • 14 years ago

134 79 14 years ago

From article:

A report from earlier this year suggested that more than 1 million U.S. households disconnected their pay-TV services in 2011. http://www.bgr.com/2012/04/04/over-1-million-u-s-cable-subsc...

From that article in April:

Nearly 2.65 million cable or satellite TV subscribers have canceled their service since 2008 to rely solely on Web-based services according to estimates from the Convergence Consulting Group. ... It is estimated that roughly 930,000 customers will cut the cord in 2012, for a total of 3.58 million subscribers since 2008. The group also estimates that traditional television providers will add 185,000 accounts this year, up from 112,000 in 2011.

2/3 of the way through 2012, and less than half of April's predicted 930,000 disconnections have occurred. Will more people disconnect during the fall and the holidays?

vonmoltke• 14 years ago

2/3 of the way through 2012, and less than half of April's predicted 930,000 disconnections have occurred. Will more people disconnect during the fall and the holidays?

I got the impression from the article that these are numbers through Q2, so only half the year. If so, the pace would be about right.

rhplus• 14 years ago

I mentioned on a previous thread that satellite/cable TV companies need to be adding 1.1% to their subscriber numbers ever year just to keep pace with the growth of the number of households in the US[1]. If you looked at the percentage of households that subscribe rather than raw subscriber numbers, we'd see an even steeper decline over the past 10 years or so.

[1] http://www.census.gov/prod/1/pop/p25-1129.pdf

jftuga• 14 years ago

Some people will disconnect when their contract is up. I signed a 2 year contract but it expires in January. My biggest apprehension is having to turn my 2 HD DVRs back in. Then realizing a few months later that I want 'real' service again. This would mean that I would to pay another upfront cost to rent the DVRs again.

bradleyland• 14 years ago

Looks like cable peaked in 2001, with increasing losses since then.

http://www.ncta.com/Stats/BasicCableSubscribers.aspx

It's also interesting to see that HSI over cable exploded around 2001.

http://www.ncta.com/Stats/High-Speed-Internet-Customers.aspx

EDIT: Posted a graph on my blog: http://www.bradlanders.com/2012/08/02/cable-television-subsc...

chaz• 14 years ago

You're not counting satellite, which has been taking market share away from cable. As of 2011, 60.4% of households have cable, and 31.1% of households have "alternative distribution systems," almost all of which is satellite, like DirecTV and DISH. Safe to assume that very few households have both cable and satellite, so about 90% of households have pay TV.

Page 10: http://www.tvb.org/media/file/TV_Basics.pdf

benmccann• 14 years ago

According to the data in this article DirectTV and Dish Network both lost subscribers as well this quarter (52,000 and 10,000 respectively). While the losses historically were at the hands of the satellite operators, more recently it has been lost to the internet.

nicholassmith2• 14 years ago

I moved house recently and decided to no longer pay for a TV subscription (which as I'm in the UK would be Sky). I don't watch much in the way of TV, my girlfriend watches a bit more so it was a tricky choice.

We've ended up with NetFlix through an Apple TV as our primary source of content, it's not perfect but there's enough stuff on their that we have an interest in to keep us entertained.

I'd be interested in seeing the stats for how many in the UK are going down this route, we've got slightly less services available, and as far as I can tell we have much less choice than over the pond.

goatforce5• 14 years ago

Do you get Freeview?

The selection of free broadcast channels in the UK is really quite exceptional:

http://www.freeview.co.uk/Channels

nicholassmith2• 14 years ago

Yeah we do, which covers our 'lets just put the TV on'.

sp332• 14 years ago

Tempted to call this blogspam; the actual information is from http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/02/paytv-idUSL2E8J29M...

benologist2• 14 years ago

It's more than just blogspam, BGR also have a few HN accounts they dump links here with.

jonursenbach• 14 years ago

[Citation Needed]

wave3• 14 years ago

One thing I missed after canceling pay TV is the way I used to watch news. You just turn on the TV and there is news. So I created http://tiltview.com to gather current news and play it without having to do any work.

harpastum• 14 years ago

Wow, this is really cool. I actually prefer this to watching broadcast news. You get the same feeling, but the ability to skip stories I'm not interested in makes the whole process way smoother.

karanbhangui• 14 years ago

This is really cool. Talk about making something people want :) Future plans with this?

wave3• 14 years ago

People are asking for mobile app.

nazgulnarsil• 14 years ago

I sort of regard people who enjoy watching the news the same as the people who enjoy watching horror films.

What is the matter with you people?

Karunamon• 14 years ago

Not so much watching the news but having some kind of ambient noise that may be informative. It's the same reason I have NPR on most of the time in the background.

heretohelp• 14 years ago

News provides the gestalt for what's going to be rattling around in other peoples' heads. It also gives you material to work with for small talk.

If your work or day to day life doesn't involve interacting with people even a little bit the utility of this is somewhat limited. I doubt there is a very large number of people for whom that is true.

mmariani3• 14 years ago

As I am also a cable quitter, I really wanted to check it out. But it didn't work on Safari iOS 5.1.1. Could you take a look at it? Thanks!

wave3• 14 years ago

I am using 5.1.7 and it works fine. Do you have flash blocker or JavaScript disabled?

callil• 14 years ago

I'd love to hear more about how you built this. How does it pull news videos?

fletchowns• 14 years ago

I find listening to the news on the radio to be much more enjoyable than watching the news on TV. Really great to listen to while cooking/cleaning/doing laundry, etc. Plus the programming on my public radio station is just so damn good.

naner• 14 years ago

I'm the opposite, I loathe TV news. It is especially bad now during election season. Drivel, platitudes, sensationalized crap, and one feel-good story about the local kid who saved a puppy or whatever. I can do without.

duaneb2• 14 years ago

Then watch good news, like PBS NewsHour.

notatoad3• 14 years ago

Tv news might be terrible, but there is definitely something to be said for having a certain selection of stories pushed at you. If nothing else it gives you perspective and context knowing what news everybody else is paying attention to. I noticed a terrible confirmation bias seeping in to my news when I got all my news from Internet sources.

kzrdude• 14 years ago

Great stuff. I'd love to have some influence on the mix (-obama and mitt, +europe, +technology, etc).

chrischen• 14 years ago

This is excellent. If only there were a way to get this on to my TV via apple tv.

CrankyPants• 14 years ago

Nice.

Suggestion: consider adding youtube.com/stratforvideo to your mix.

prawn• 14 years ago

I don't bother with TV news but I did have a positive reaction to your site. I like how there's no screwing around - straight away it's giving you something to watch and easy buttons to skip ahead if you're not interested. Would be great if there were quick options to thumbs up/down a video to get more or less of that type of news (politics vs world vs sport, etc) or ignore a particular provider that has long, boring brand intros.

I'm sure it'd also be trivial to introduce skippable ads that were tailored and of interest (in an ideal world...) to viewers.

JonnieCache• 14 years ago

All the news you need can be heard for free on the BBC world service. It has a refreshingly internationalist perspective which is interesting to compare and contrast with countrys' national news bulletins.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/

juddlyon• 14 years ago

I can't give up my habit until I can watch basketball and boxing online. Ain't happening anytime soon.

alirov3• 14 years ago

I don't know about boxing but to watch the NBA (I know that's not going to cover college sports), you can get NBA League Pass for around $100. It's not necessarily cheap but it's cheaper than paying the $64 a month I used to with DirecTV (the cheapest option in my area).

Edit: Just wanted to point out that it's $100 for a whole season and not per month of course.

tcdent• 14 years ago

MLB has a similar arrangement for between $40 and $50 a year.

99992• 14 years ago

The online version of NBA league pass is basically useless.

1) All nationally televised games are blacked out (anything on ABC, TNT, ESPN, etc.)

2) Locally televised games are blacked out on a by region basis. So if you want to watch the Heat play, but they're broadcasting the game on Fox Sports East or whatever and you live in Florida, you can't watch it.

3) The video quality is incredibly low. It's an SD stream at less than 1 mbps. Godawful. To be fair though, the Cable version of League Pass also sports some awful video quality (super compressed HD when that's even available, and it frequently isn't).

Roboprog• 14 years ago

Cable/Sat is great if you love sports. If you don't watch sports, it really sucks that this is where most of your subscription fees are going, plus you have to buy ever larger packages just to get a few more geeky channels.

Better just to buy from Amazon what you can't get on Netflix. Cheaper in the long run.

Too bad the cable/sat operators refuse to regroup their packages, lest they anger the sporting gods. Well, good riddance, jerks.

paul9290• 14 years ago

Oh great! Here comes the bandwidth caps and overages for going over your cap.

Google Fiber needs to deploy nationally to stop these cable TV/ISP providers from making up their losses thru bandwidth overages!

That said for me, once I found EDonkey2000/Sharereactor I cut the cord. Cable TV sucks, specifically it's business model!

MartinCron3• 14 years ago

I don't have pay TV and use netflix/amazon/iTunes streaming a lot. I sometimes have multiple kids watching distinct video streams on different devices at the same time.

I haven't hit the bandwidth cap with my comcast internet-only service yet. I can imagine you need to get seriously into torrenting HD movies to go over the edge.

pyre• 14 years ago

I think that the parent post was suggesting that the ISPs might increase overage charges, and reduce the bandwidth caps (as in smaller amount before overage charges) as a way of offsetting customers dropping their cable tv subscription (i.e. lost revenue) and streaming more video over their internet connection (i.e. more strain on the ISP's network + maintenance costs).

RonMN580SR• 14 years ago

As wave pointed out a lot of news videos are available on the internet. We at Metadata Labs have a web services which finds and plays internet videos on a variety of subjects including News. Take a look at http://debsnews.com

SwellJoe3• 14 years ago

I think this is really interesting in the context of the HBO story: http://allthingsd.com/20120801/hbo-ignores-internet-geniuses...

Will companies like HBO make the necessary changes to their business to survive the end of pay TV, or will they go down with the ship, stubbornly clinging to their high margins and tightly controlled distribution channel? Of course, cable companies have, in collusion with telcos, locked down the Internet last mile in most markets by putting independent ISPs out of business...so they may not suffer much in the next few years, unless and until Google fiber comes along and makes them utterly irrelevant.

catweasel• 14 years ago

This is very much the reason Rupert Murdoch (and by extension News Limited papers) is so opposed to the NBN in Australia.

jsz0• 14 years ago

Sounds impressive until you realize that just Comcast and TWC alone have about 35 million subscribers. I couldn't find a total number for all pay TV subscribers but I would guess it's above 100 million.

protolif• 14 years ago

This number would be a lot larger, were it not for Comcast (and probably others) bundling Cable TV service in with their Internet packages, for considerably less money than you can get Internet alone. I don't know if they're inflating their numbers to show their investors or what, but I can't wait for Google fiber. Even though I don't really trust Google anymore, they're the lesser evil here.

geebee• 14 years ago

I recently quit cable. I mainly watch sports, and I discovered that various web feeds along with espn3 gives me enough coverage that I don't really need cable (I'd say it's about 70% of what I want to watch). I do miss some soccer/tennis, but overall it's worth it - coverage through official web feeds is still good, and full digital cable is really expensive.

The big disappointment has been the olympics. But as a tennis fan, I'm not at all surprised that NBC has been a disappointment. I was really delighted when the finally lost their rights to wimbledon, because finally things were aired live and were accessible on line.

NBC has pretty much limited live web streaming to people who are paying for expensive cable packages. Essentially, they'll let you watch on the web as long as you aren't using the web to avoid paying for cable.

ESPN is still be a little crappy about this - you do have to get your web through a particular provider (though if you have a military or university account, you'll also get through). But nowhere near as bad as NBC, and no surprise there.

400,000 American homes have dumped pay-TV so far this year

Related Stories