Pace Of Cord Cutting Continues To Quicken

from the ramping-up dept

While we've discussed cord cutting before, it seems like the entertainment industry has been slow to respond to it. It was only recently that Nielson seemed to acknowledge its occurrence, for instance, and even once television stations faced the facts and attempted to embrace internet streaming, they did so with the kind of guile and tact you'd expect out of a drunken giraffe. Lots of time delays, restrictions, and barriers to entry that will turn away the kind of person who is likely a cord-cutter. In other words, they're doing it wrong.

And they had better start learning to do it right, because the pace of cord cutting is ramping up. This from Moffett Research's Craig Moffett, former offerer of terrible broadband infrastructure advice and someone who previously indicated that cord cutters were "poor nobodies."

Moffett Research founder and analyst Craig Moffett said mid-day Tuesday that evidence of cord cutting has become more apparent in the latest set of figures...For the second quarter, publicly traded pay TV companies recorded a combined video subscriber decline of 380,000, "about the same as last year," Moffett said. "Household formation, however, was better than a year ago, meaning that the change in pay TV penetration was worse."

In other words, the pool of potential customers has risen with no correlative rise in subscribers. That's an indication that more households are foregoing cable television entirely and, what with the ever-growing interest in entertainment from the public, that had better represent a huge concern for the industry. Television providers have done a horrible job of making their content available in the way customers want it, when the customers want it, and they result has been a declining subscriber base.

What's more, the crowning jewel that keeps much of that pay-TV revenue coming in has been live sports entertainment and if you look at the flagship station for that kind of thing, ESPN, the ratings hits have been massive. Couple that with a clearly stated goal by Google and others to expand sports streaming over the internet and you have a recipe for the decimation of cable TV.

All this, rather than giving customers what they want, how they want it, and when they want it -- and, hey, welcome to the reality party, Craig! Why don't you stick around awhile this time?

Filed Under: broadband, cable, cord cutters, cord cutting, craig moffet, tv