Thursday, August 02, 2012

Cord Cutting is for Real

TV cord cutting is for real. DirecTV has suffered a net loss of subscribers for the first time. TWC lost 169,000 subscribers. Comcast lost 176,000 video subscribers this quarter and 238,000 a year earlier.

It is a flat market that might be on the decline. Customer acquisition is expensive due to equipment and competition from satellite TV, cablecos and telco tv providers. Add in the other competitors like Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Hulu and it may be the end of TV. of course, the cablecos are metering and capping to protect their TV revenues, especially, since they own sports channels and Comcast owns NBC/U. Google shunned ESPN on its TV listing for Kansas City FTTP. The whole space is in flux. I think the dollars in this silo have no where to go but down.

How will networks and content creators deal with that? This totally disrupts their model? And will actors still make $1M per episode?

Do you think that some of it has to do with households having to cut expenses? If you consider that the TV bill keeps increasing and so does the cell phone bill, then you can see that many households have to decide which to keep.

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