Cable TV Continues Slow Death, Losing 400,000 Customers This Year
via WRAPUP 1-Americans drop pay-TV; business matures in weak economy | Reuters.
NEW YORK, Aug 2 (Reuters) – Stubbornly high U.S. unemployment, a weak housing market combined with a mature business prone to regular programming blackouts has seen more than 400,000 American homes drop their pay-TV service since the start of the year.
DirecTV Group, the No.1 U.S. satellite TV provider, revealed its first ever quarterly customer losses on Thursday, with some 52,000 homes dropping the service in the second quarter. That was more than analysts expected from a company long seen as the best run video provider in the industry.
Also on Thursday, Time Warner Cable Inc, the No.2 cable provider said it lost more subscribers than analysts expected with 169,000 customers leaving the service. While a small per centage of Time Warner Cable company’s 12.3 million total customers, this is a 10th straight quarter of customer losses.
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“NEW YORK, Aug 2 (Reuters) – Stubbornly high U.S. unemployment, a weak housing market, regular programming blackouts, combined with a mature business prone to offering customers A THOUSAND CHANNELS BUT NOTHING TO WATCH EXCEPT CRAP, has seen more than 400,000 American homes drop their pay-TV service since the start of the year.”
There, I just fixed it for Reuters.
I’d like to be able to say that I was one of the 400,000, but I can’t.
I had my cable disconnected over two years ago – and I haven’t missed it at all.
The greed of the program producers is killing cable and satellite services. I don’t like to use that word, greed, but a standard cable or sat service package costs more than $100 per month and that’s over the limit the public will pay. Charging extra for hi-def is another killer.
If that industry doesn’t wake up, they’ll go the way of the music business.
Yes. I obtained “Triple Play,” the Internet/Phone/Basic Cable package from Comcast, around three years ago. The bill then was about $100. In three years, this bill has grown to a bit over $150. Three years. For 80 channels of basic crap, occasionally interspersed with something half-good.
Makes you wonder: did the Obama Administration learn their “tax the rich (and everybody else)” routine from the Cable providers?
The bill then was about $100. In three years, this bill has grown to a bit over $150.
Yep, that sounds just like Comcast.
Some years back in this area, Comcast was looking to acquire the provider of cable services in this area (TCI Cablevision), and an article in the local newspaper said that Comcast had a reputation for high prices. Wasn’t that ever the truth. Before the acquisition, I was paying about $37 a month for Expanded Basic, which was about eighty channels. After almost two years of periodical bump-ups in price that seemed to come almost every three months or so, it reached almost $60.
I just rid myself of the television package from Comcast but still have the net. I told the operator that if they cranked the price up on the net they would crank me out of their service completely.
Time-Warner, which forces mainly on the larger markets, is also losing out to Verizon’s FiOS right now, which for statistical purposes I don’t think counts as cable, but really is except under the phone company’s name.
Competition like that, in areas where people may not have a viable satellite TV option, is the only way we’re eventually going to get to what people want, which is a la carte channel selection, or at the very least being able to select channel ‘bundles’ by category (news, sports, movies, etc.). It would allow each household — or even individual sets within households — to pick and choose the channels they want to pay for. But the scary part for the cable companies, many of whom, like Time-Warner, also operate multiple channels, is that the current system supports the crappier channels people don’t want, but the companies are able to sell ad time on right now.
They won’t kill off a system that forces people to pay for their channels and then allows for ad sales based on subscriber rates, unless the current move away from cable becomes a stampede. Internet options like Roku or Apple TV combined with alternatives like FiOS may force the issue in the next few years, and that may also mean for some cable channels to survive, they’re going to have to improve their programming.
This probably explains why, while AT&T sends me my phone/ISP bill once a month, it’s a rare month when they don’t send me at least 8 to 10 mailings more-or-less demanding that I sign up for their bundled “AT&T U-Verse” phone/ISP/cable package.
Not to mention that whenever I sign out of Yahoo Mail, the system tries to take me to a “sales screen” that it doesn’t want to let me out of until I buy U-Verse. Fortunately, NoScript allows me to ignore it.
I suspect the next trick will be to refuse phone/ISP service to anybody who doesn’t buy the whole package. Whether or not they get away with it (in a legal sense) will probably depend on who they give the most campaign contributions to, and who wins the election.
clear ether
eon
We have cable for the internet and so the wife can watch her cooking shows. My wife’s choice of programs brings to mind the description from some years back about a vast wasteland. I honestly cannot believe the crap that is broadcast everyday.
I personally don’t watch tv except for Fox news on weekdays, then it’s only an hour or two before I’m fed up with so many commercials.
If any US cable company wants to regain viewers, I suggest they start carrying Canada’s Sun TV. They beat the heck out of Fox when it comes to news coverage. Too bad I can’t view it except via clips on the Internet. We make a point of embedding clips from Sun TV on our blog on a regular basis, but that’s a poor substitute for live cable TV viewing.
I cannot help but wonder if Netflix streaming to TV isn’t playing a significant role here in attracting many TV viewers away from the super-bloated-with-lousy-channels cable & sattelite providers.
You can string together a basically complete entertainment package for like 18 bucks a month. You can buy individual shows from Amazon (cheaper than itunes).
The problem for me was the bundling. Paying for things I don’t want. Now I get movies (netflix) cheap and sports plus news on the internet. The old models are dying. The new ones fit the customer better. That’s progress, no?
I cancelled over a year ago because I got tired of the leftist message pouring into my home in a thousand different ways, sometimes subtle, other times blatant. I decided my subscription was helping finance their poison, so I voted with my dollars and cut it off.
I use the savings to buy DVDs and streaming movies — all mostly pre-1960! And I read more books. Life is better now by far.
had a run in with verizon right away. someone broke into my house and stole my phone and computer. they wanted hundreds for the simplest phone and wouldn’t let me reconnect my old verizon phone. it cost many hundreds to get out of the contract.
about a year ago i got mediacom for cable t.v. the audio reception was terrible and they couldn’t resolve even after 3 visits. the 4th time they never even showed up. when i called about it the guy got very testy. i asked how much to just cancel and things went downhill from there. he finally said it woud cost me about $250 + final bill. the final total was $953 and their collection agency began calling almost immediately. the bill even had installation costs on it after almost a year of service. when i calm down i plan to call them. they screw you and use the threat of ruining your credit to get whatever they decide to charge. many businesses operate like this.
went back to direct, even though the bill goes up constantly. same w/ my internet and at&t. good initial price for both though.
We were using Comcast for Internet/phone/TV, and when the bill suddenly jumped to $184/mo., discovered that the plain old broadcast antenna in this house picked up most of the programming we were watching anyway — in HD, yet. So … dropped Comcast TV, switched to Vonage for phone, retained Comcast for Internet. Throw in Netflix and Amazon’s Prime streaming services and … well, honestly, I don’t need even those, given the amount of backed-up free- and almost-free literature on the Kindle …
I watch about 3 or 4 hours of regular tv a week, but my lady takes in about that a day. Most of it is confined to one suite of brands done by the same company… give me ala carte and I’ll add that to Roku and get rid of cable tv. Most of what I’m getting is through Roku with the Amazon Prime free stuff, GBTV, and the free movies and shows from a variety of ‘channels’. Amazon is even testing user-produced movies and programs which ought to be interesting.
With the ability of computers to do a lot of the video and ‘movie’ composition work, and the cameras getting cheaper, the day of the home-produced movie/tv show is coming and fast. Hollywood is stuck in a rut, and can’t get out of it, and that is due to the inbreeding of the place over the decades. Since it won’t reach out to lower cost producers, they will now reach directly to the audience. I welcome that day and the end of cable, the end of the networks and the end of Hollywood.
If you want some more independent type Roku channels than the standard Netflix/HuluPlus/Crackle/Amazon, check out Revision TV, ADC, Wall Street Journal, Fox News, or UFC TV. You can stream pictures and video with Juice for Roku (with an Android phone and a $3 app), play direct from USB on some models, and get additional content using your PC as a server with PlayOn.
I dumped the bilingual DirecTV package that was well North of $100/month for four Roku’s ($48 for the budget 720p model) and have never regretted the decision. I now pay $16/month total for premium channels, plus a few Amazon rentals. This is the direction the industry is headed and the middlemen (cable/satellite) simply offer the consumer nothing of value. After the content providers get a better feel for revenue forecasting, expect them to become more confident providing content directly over Roku, etc. If you cut the cable, don’t forget to do a little research on over-the-air antennae reception prior to football season.
I can’t live without my cable internet. Nothing is faster or more reliable. So, I’ve got Cablevision’s triple-play (cable basic). I don’t watch TV, but what to do?
I was one of the 40,000. The only real sacrifice was “Phineas and Ferb”, which isn’t available online. But I’ll really enjoy the $80 a month I’ll save.
I’ll tell you what the basic problem is. Springsteen wrote a song called “57 channels and nothing on” some years back. Problem is we’ve now got 500 something channels – and nothing on. Between that and the overpriced lack of ability to choose what few channels we actually want to get… well. You end up paying huge numbers to watch 3 or 4 half-decent channels.
Personally, I’d rather read a good book.
I only watch football so I use hi-def rabbit ears in the winter. The tv shows I watch I download from the internet via crime. Netflix provides me everything else. I might consider cable if it were cheaper and programs didn’t repeat themselves as much as I remember them doing when I had cable. I also can’t stand reality tv, which seems to drive a lot of cable programming. The teaser rates for package plans look tempting but it can go up whatever amount they choose in the future.
I gave up television altogether about 5 years ago. I enjoy reading more and more, not to mention talking with my wife, hobbies such as fishing, etc. Life has improved greatly without the intrusion of tv. I will never go back.
Dropped cable around 6 months ago. I got tired of flipping past innumerable reality shows of nobodies who happen to have breasts and a penchant for acting out like awful children.
I got tired of Infomercials and Bigfoot and Ghostchasers and the umpteenth showing of movies.
I’d already stopped watching the Big 3 networks and, when cable become too much chaff for too little wheat, I just pulled the plug. I’ll miss football this season, but, it’s SO quiet nowadays and I have all these new books to read….
It’s cheaper to go to a bar each time your favorite team is on.
When will they learn that lowering the price is better than losing customers?
We don’t have access to cable at all in our rural area, and that means no real high speed internet either. Our best choice is satellite internet and that isn’t fast enough to stream TV shows, maybe with the new satellite and equipment. But I’m not paying for cable TV, so that’s win!
We just moved, and opted not to get the TV channels “bundled” thru Verizon Vios. We are only just starting to get used to the Roku, but so far so good. With two boys who like cartoons, I’m sure glad to get rid of all the annoying and repetitive commercials. And, they are getting introduced to classic Three Stooges and Rocky and Bullwinkle now. Win win.
espn is about 28% of your regular cable bill…couple that with the shopping channels and the ever increasing paid programming, i ditched comcast last year. i went with digital antenna for local and netflix for streaming content. i don’t have to flip past all of the worthless crap leftist rant spewing stations anymore or pay for pc sports programming.
Careful what you wish for, oh streamers of content– metered bandwidth is coming; cell phone providers have proven that you’ll get used to it, and cable companies will follow suit.
My wife was laid off from her construction job November 2009. Things were darn tight for a while, so we dropped cable and switched to broadcast TV. Things are fine on the job front for us now, but we’ll NEVER go back to cable.
At work I hear co-workers grouse about the terrible, terrible service they receive from cable providers, the hundred-plus dollars they spend a month and I just laugh. We toyed around with the idea of getting a Roku, but we didnt even bother. We get what we want from broadcast and netflix on-demand.
The problem has always been the package deals these companies force on us. I have about 20 or so shows I DVR and watch. If I can get just those channels or programs I want, 90% of those channels get cancelled. If every individual channel I actually watch cost me $5 a month, I could be spending $30 a month, not the $80 DirectTV is changing. My contract ends this November and I don’t plan on renewing.
I cut the cord a year and a half ago and haven’t looked back. I still get my high-speed Internet from Charter — they panicked and called me about 5 times the next week — but the total bill is less than half what I paid before for a pretty basic tier that was, like so many others have noted, a lot of crap I didn’t watch. Now, with Netflix, I’m much more intentional about what I watch, when I watch, and I consume a lot more informative podcasts. The idiot box is a smaller part of my life now, finally. And if I want to keep up with a current show (like Breaking Bad), I can always buy a season pass on iTunes; even if I buy passes for three new shows every month, I’m still paying less than I did before. I don’t miss network TV at all. When I see it on a hotel TV it’s just loud and obnoxious (the programs, not the commercials). I’m watching the Mars Science Laboratory landing tonight on a UStream feed displaying on my HD TV. Better than anything on regular TV.
I don’t watch much, but my GF does. I counted nine (9) commercials in a row a few nights ago.
That’s well past saturation for me.
Not only that, but most of the programming is abysmal. They can put a fork in TV.
I don’t wonder why so many cable TV subscribers drop the service. I wonder why so few.
TimeWarner Cable won’t allow me to access the HBO Go program because I get my broadband service from a different supplier. That ticked me off – we are all getting conditioned to being able to access what we pay for anywhere, anytime.
My guess is that traditional “cable” will be gone in 5 years. Streaming video (netflix, roku, etc.) is a superior delivery method in every way. In five years Time Warner will look like Blockbuster looks today.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ XD