New Study Shows A Rise In Cord Cutting
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Most of the channels I may have been interested in watching have slowly descended into drivel: Discovery, History, TLC, Science...they all show total garbage reality shows 24/7 these days. A huge portion of the hundreds of other channels we got seemed to be essentially filler garbage to inflate the channel count.
Aside from the content, the UI/UX of the whole cable experience is terrible. Our cable box was brand new and 'top of the line', yet was so slow that I'd sometimes count the seconds between selecting something and seeing any sort of feedback. The 'cloud DVR' service–touted by our cable provider as a premium feature that would allow you to watch recorded shows in other rooms or on different devices–would regularly simply not function, or, especially on nights when a popular series was premiering (Breaking Bad comes to mind), would throw 503 errors when trying to watch the recording.
We were spending upwards of $150/month for service, and they kept trying to sneak in rate increases. Towards the end of our lease neither of us-even my TV industry roommate-watched anything on TV. Cable TV is a terrible service and I'm glad to see that it's getting shaken up.
Extremely expensive, enormous amount of advertising, content is only available on a time schedule, DVR is slow and still has the ads you have to fast forward through (if it works at all).
I don't understand why anybody would pay for it (with the notable exception of sports).
My fear is that it'll shift into a service like Hulu where they ditch the time schedule, but you're still paying for tons of advertising. I hope the Netflix and HBO model win (or even Apple and Amazon). Better content, no advertising, better price. I hope the others fail and take all of their shitty content down with them.
Seems to be in every industry. Enough people switch to rooftop solar, utilities can't survive. Enough people switch to electric cars, all of the infrastructure around gas vehicles starts to come undone. What's the tipping point for cable tv? At what point is it no longer sustainable for them to operate as they've traditionally done?
Interesting times.
Its probably not a big deal, in the end; if people cord cut and eschew TV-style content, it might hurt cable providers. But cord cutters that just increase consumption of higher-speed internet services are just transferring demand from "cable TV" to "high speed internet", and the providers of those services are largely the same anyway. So, demand shifts, and CATV fades away and ISP prices increase, and the same big companies make the same big money and have to maintain fewer distinct service offerings to do it.
cable on the other hand, doesn't seem like its that far away. besides infrastructure, one of the reasons why cable is expensive is they have to pay royalties to content providers. lets assume cable went away today, do you really think netflix / hulu would be able to charge the same rate?
they are trying to free themselves from the content providers by producing their own original content
I too am without cable, but there's hardly a shortage of places that have the next game on a TV around me. Having a pint or two for the occasional game (or sitting at the squat rack or elliptical while watching TV) is a much better alternative than paying ludicrous amounts every month.
Incidentally, it is WAY easier to cancel a Cox account in person at the local office than on the phone.
If you don't want to be on a contract, don't sign a contract.
Back in the early days, it'd almost always take at least one in-person visit to activate the cable card - Frequently two. Nowadays, I can get it done in 3 or less phone calls.
Did I mention I hate cable?
I completely agree. It's amazing how these once interesting channels have decided to go the reality TV route, and it's so far away from the type of programming you'd assume they would have. I remember being devastated when the History Channel started doing this.
Given that, those channels can either go out of business, or pivot to provide content for the remaining audience.
I'd rather use HBO Go most of the time now that I have legit access to it, except logging in on it requires going through Verizon, which manages to screw it up about 50% of the time. It's also perpetually requiring me to re-register my TV with the service.
The On-Demand service is terribly slow to navigate. The cable box also routinely shows interstitial ads when trying to browse the program guide. It's like somehow the additional competition has actually made their service worse.
Unless you consider shows like "How it's Made", "Mythbusters", "Extreme Engineering", "Outrageous Acts of Science", "Engineering Disasters", "The Universe", "Ancient Impossible", "Ancient Discoveries", "How the Earth Was Made", and "Modern Marvels" to be "reality shows", I have to disagree. Those shows are all full of good and interesting history and science.
Yes, there is a lot of drivel in prime time and daytime to pay the bills, but with a DVR and a small amount of planning, you can extract quite a bit of good stuff from Discovery, History (I'm including H2 in this), and Science. TLC, though, is largely crap.
Similar for National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Animal Planet: a fair amount of crap, but some gems for science/engineering types you can DVR without much effort.
Except I am currently a cable TV subscriber. I have to call Comcast every 6-12 months when my "deal" expires. I used to have 150mbit service, but in the dark days of the Comcast vs Netflix battles, I could only stream at 240x120. So I said "screw it" and switched to 25mbit service for far less money -- my Netflix streams got better, too!
Then once that deal was up, they offered to double my speed to 50mbit and drop my price by $5/month.. if I was willing to become a cable TV subscriber again. Turns out the "limited basic" is really just lifeline these days, but they did throw in HBO for the first time in my life.
I returned the cable box to them on day 1; all of my TV programming comes OTA from a Mohu Sky to my HDHomeRun and goes through my WMC7 DVR. I occasionally watch HBO Go on my AppleTV which is the only use I get out of my cable TV subscription.
But according to Comcast's numbers, I am a cable TV subscriber -- or at least will be, for the next 6 months. I'm actually willing to pay a bit extra per month to NOT be listed as a subscriber, but unfortunately very few internet-only deals seem to exist in ComcastLand.
Incidentally, they also bumped me to 100mbit from 50, and recently from 100 to 150. 150mbit for $60/mo is nothing to shake a stick at I suppose. I just wish they couldn't count me as one of their subscribers.
They're gaming their subscriber numbers the same way the NYTimes is when they basically make you throw away the dead tree edition to get a cheaper digital subscription.
I'm in the philly suburbs and paying that much for 20mbit and no TV.
I at least took the cable box home, and plugged it in. I had to unplug it in October when I was moving some furniture around, and it was February before I got around to plugging it back in! (One of the players in my D&D group wanted to see if we could put the Puppy Bowl on; turns out I didn't get the channel)
I'd love to see their training on selling in bundles.
Unfortunately, as much as I'd like to switch to their competitor Sonic (Bay Area), similar speed isn't even offered let alone comparable.
Please Sonic, bring me 100-150Mb speeds for $70/mo and steal all of Comcast's business!
I spent the past year streaming streaming NFL Red Zone and TNT for the NBA Playoffs using my parents's cable login info online. I casted both to my television (didn't have an HDMI out adapter for my laptop) and the quality was not on-par with HD video from a cable box, despite a 100Mbps connection. This is mainly due to the transcoding happening when casting, however, even when using the WatchESPN app on the Amazon Fire TV, I experienced similar video quality. Further, the lag between "real-time" (when I see reactions on Twitter or from my friends watching on cable) and what I saw was about a minute or two. As a huge fan who craves content now, I find that lag unacceptable for me, and hardly consider it live television.
I understand I am likely in a small minority, even for sports fans, but the current cord-cutting options are just not adequate for me. I will be adding cable service in August in preparation for football season.
I've always started my NHL season trying NHL Gamecenter and always ended up canceling it within a few weeks and paying through the nose for Center Ice (which comes out to ~$90/mo with pre-requisite cable).
I wish I could watch local broadcast TV from my computer. But when broadcast TV went digital, it made it harder to get a decent signal. Partial signals on digital are a lot worse than it was with analog.
In high school, university and through my early 20's, I pirated most of the music I listened to, and nearly all of the TV shows and movies I watched.
Now, even though pirating content is now easier than ever, and I still refuse to pay for cable, I now consume the vast majority of content legitimately via online streaming.
My personal reasons are twofold:
- As I've gotten older, my income has grown and I can afford to pay a reasonable amount for access to media.
- Nearly all the content I want to watch is covered by a combination of Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Now, Rdio and sports league network subscriptions.
I wonder if I'm part of a larger trend of pirates becoming legitimate online viewers/listeners as more content becomes available for legitimate online streaming, and how large that trend is.
I grew up in a family that didn't watch cable TV, because cable was not even available in the neighborhood. Then I went to college and got my own apartment in the city, but didn't have money for cable. (Technically, I got cable, but with the internet-only plan. I ditched that as well when I found that dry-loop DSL was cheaper.)
Nowadays, I could easily get cable if I wanted, but I don't see why I should. Since I never had it, I don't know what I'm missing, so I don't miss it.
Also in the US, fubo.tv carries some matches in a few other top European leagues. It's a bit of a strange service, but it's cheap and worked well enough for me the few times I used it last season. The quality is slightly better than Fox Soccer 2Go, but still nowhere near broadcast HD. They appear to have a deal with BeIN Sports such that, if a match is being shown on TV on BeIN Sports USA, you can stream it online with just a subscription to fubo.tv (no TV service required). I can't figure out BeIN Sports USA; it seems like they show some Serie A matches, some Ligue 1 matches, and some La Liga matches, but not all. fubo.tv used to carry Bundesliga matches, as well, but as that's moving to Fox Soccer 2Go this season, I don't think fubo.tv will carry those anymore. In any case, I'm waiting until August to decide whether or not to renew my fubo.tv subscription, based on what they're offering for the upcoming European football season.
The Barclays Premier League is NBCSN-only in the US and requires a cable subscription -- for now, at least.
Links:
The alternative is to subscribe to 4 or 5 of these streaming services, and have to explain: "Well, honey for this show you need to use this service and navigate it this way, use this HDMI input on the TV. For that show, you need to use this other service, on the media player (so different remote), and this input. For movies, you need to use Netflix and do it this way.. For cartoons for the kid, you need to use this service..." No way that's going to fly.
What I really want is a service where she can just memorize how and when to get to the already few things she wants to watch, be able to get to them by just turning on the TV, and not have to switch inputs, devices, remotes, UIs, etc. Hey, wait, that's called standard Cable TV service!
As for the different streaming services, it doesn't sound like any more work than what she is doing now. Instead of memorizing which show is on which channel at what time, you just memorize which show is on which service.
Power TV, wake up media PC, navigate to Hulu+, navigate to or search for show, navigate to episode, hit play, wait while it buffers, watch show.
I'd argue that until it's as dead simple as cable: Power, 45, ENTER, ...it's not going to catch on in the mass market.
The net out is that she reads a lot more.
(No particular lesson, just another piece of anecdata to join the growing pile that always ends up on threads on this subject.)
I also thing a major part of this might be that colleges don't really have cable... So students spend a year without cable, realize that they don't really need it and that it's expensive. I definitely think that not having cable at Universities causes some of "I can live without" attitude you're seeing here.
Which is funny, because back in The Day, the selling point for cable was that it was better quality than broadcast (plus a few extra channels).
Some nights I'll watch an old TV show or a documentary on Amazon Prime while I'm eating dinner. The selection isn't the greatest, but it's only something to do for 20 minutes while I eat dinner, so I don't really care. It's essentially "free" because I already had Prime for the free 2 day shipping.
This is somewhat related and hilarious: http://www.theonion.com/article/area-man-constantly-mentioni...
Verizon is about to launch a "cord-cutting" online video service, and it may even use AOL/Techcrunch's advertising network to power it:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/26/us-verizon-video-i...
So, we got Netflix streaming on my aging PS3, Clearwire for internet, and over-the-air broadcast HDTV for the public television shows. Yeah, I miss not having DVR, but this was the cheapest option in my area, and I still get pretty decent entertainment out of that mix.
Haven't had Comcast since 2012, and it feels good. Not having cable might be permanent for us!
Unfortunately blocking sites by yourself via hosts doesn't work too well and I have yet to find a productive app that could live up to its promise.
It might not be for everyone, but works for me.
http://www.amazon.com/NOKIA-301-2-FACTORY-UNLOCKED-QUADBAND/...
The Economist is a good start, and I really enjoy the Baffler.
You don't have to entirely avoid "social curation" like HN or Reddit, but once you've replaced it with something less noisy, you can be more honest with yourself about how much that time is actually benefiting you.
I used to be a netflix subscriber but then I moved to Hulu+. There some strange appeal about uncertainty of content line-up. With Netflix you layout your own lineup. But Hulu+ has some pseud-TV feel to it.