Are Americans Giving Up on Cable TV?
by EG
Americans are cutting the cable cord at an alarming rate, and it could get worse. At least that's the message from second-quarter earnings reports, and Wall Street appears a bit spooked, with shares of Comcast, Charter Communications, Dish Network and AT&T (home of DirecTV) all down in the first week of August.
Craig Moffett at MoffettNathanson estimates a whopping 941,000 subscribers cut the cord during the quarter, up from 809,000 in the same time frame a year earlier, a clear indication cord-cutting is accelerating. "The rate of pay TV subscriber erosion worsened, rising sequentially from 2.5 percent last quarter to 2.7 percent in the second quarter, the fastest rate of decline on record," notes Moffett.
The major providers have been countering the decline with skinny bundles of TV channels online through services like DirecTV Now and Sling from Dish, but even there they are competing with such upstarts as PlayStation, YouTube and others. Dish might be in a particularly precarious position given its reliance on cut-rate packages to draw new customers. Even with Sling, the satellite provider lost 261,000 subs year-over-year.
Read the rest of this article at The Hollywood Reporter.
Most of TV's hottest programs, such as Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, are easily available through services other than cable TV.