400,000 American homes have dumped pay-TV so far this year
bgr.com
bgr.com
What is the matter with you people?
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.
I find that to be a feature not a bug. Specially when you see people bashing Flash in Android.
Everyone's view is fair and balanced in their own eyes.
The more editorial programs on public radio (This American Life, On The Media) are more opinionated, and the quality of local news is only as good as your public radio station, but NPR News is as clean as an organization as there has ever been.
Here is a well done statistical study on the subject (jump to the end for nifty charts):
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/groseclose/Media....
It's so obviously biased and emotionally charged. Makes me cringe. But it's pretty detectable bias so it's easy to disregard.
I think quite the opposite, it gives you the illusion of being informed when in reality you are just viewing a tiny slice of the world as through a soda straw.
If you really want to be informed it takes a hell of a lot more leg work.
I record the 6pm news on Tivo every night. Sometimes I watch it, mostly I don't. If something big breaks, I can watch it on the news.
Generally being alert to blogs and twitter will let you find out all the necessary to follow stories.
People waste far too much of their lives absorbing non-essential news items. In retrospect, most of us would be flat out recalling 4 big news events from the prior year.
Suggestion: consider adding youtube.com/stratforvideo to your mix.
I'm sure it'd also be trivial to introduce skippable ads that were tailored and of interest (in an ideal world...) to viewers.
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...
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?
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.
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.
Edit: Just wanted to point out that it's $100 for a whole season and not per month of course.
MLB.tv: http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/subscriptions/index.jsp
Extra Innings (found price info on Wikipedia): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLB_Extra_Innings
The 19.99 per month price reflects something closer to the normal price which would be around 20 a month for the full 6 month(ish) season.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
The selection of free broadcast channels in the UK is really quite exceptional: