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Recently rumored that Netflix and Hulu are disscussing changing their platform subscription fees to 'free'. Though Netflix has pretty much shot itself in bothfeet, this might interest some deplorables. So be on your toes for future developments.CORD CUTTERS NEWS cordcuttersnews.com/ www.youtube.com/@cordcuttersnews/videos< CORD CUTTING REPORT www.youtube.com/@cordcuttingreport/videosROKU BLOG www.roku.com/blog ROKU CHANNEL STORE channelstore.roku.com/browse

The far-left Hollywood Reporter thinks it’s doing journalism with this hilarious story about how all the major entertainment multinationals are freaking out over the fact that cord-cutting is accelerating, and streaming revenue is failing to make up for that shortfall. Here’s what’s happening… About 3.5 million people are canceling their cable/satellite packages per year. That is a massive loss of revenue for entertainment outlets. Why? Well, as I have been explaining for 15 years now, merit has nothing to do with cable TV profits. Whether you watch the Disney Grooming Channel, MTV, CNNLOL, TBS, TCM, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, or...

Five years ago, 63% of Americans mostly watched television through cable and satellite. Today, that percentage has dropped to fewer than half of all Americans, while the percentage of those primarily watching television via a streaming service on the internet has jumped 17 percentage points, from 20% in 2016 to 37% today. About one in 10 Americans watch their TV through a digital antenna, which replaced old-fashioned broadcast television several years ago.

Welcome to a world without net neutrality HBO Max, AT&T’s big bet on the future of streaming, will be excused from AT&T’s mobile data caps, while competing services like Netflix and Disney Plus will use up your data. That’s the follow-up from a Vergecast conversation with Tony Goncalves, the AT&T executive in charge of HBO Max. Asked whether HBO Max would hit the cap, Goncalves said his team “had the conversation” but didn’t have the answer. AT&T later confirmed to The Verge that HBO Max will be excused from the company’s traditional data caps and the soft data caps on...

Disney’s new streaming service, Disney+, has already seen 10 million sign-ups since launching Tuesday, the company announced Wednesday. Disney’s stock was up 7.35% by Wednesday’s close, adding more than $13 billion to its market cap, which now sits at $268 billion. Netflix shares were down 3.1%. Disney’s new streaming service launched Tuesday with some technical errors that prevented some users from connecting with the service. But that didn’t stop customers from flooding the sign-up page. At $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year, Disney+ is significantly cheaper than competitors such as Netflix, which charges $12.99 for its most popular standard...

AT&T Inc. is exploring parting with its DirecTV satellite unit...a move that would mark a mark a sharp course correction in strategy for Chief Executive Randall Stephenson, who billed his $49 billion bet on the satellite provider as a key to the phone giant’s future...AT&T acquired DirecTV in 2015 for $49 billion. The company’s shrinking satellite business is under a microscope after activist investor Elliott Management Corp. disclosed a $3.2 billion stake in AT&T last week and released a report pushing for strategic changes. Elliott has told investors that AT&T should unload DirecTV...

Pay-TV keeps taking hits in subscribers, with Leichtman Research Group finding in its latest quarterly report that about 1.53 million people dropped their pay-TV subscriptions during the second quarter of 2019. This is the fourth consecutive quarter of decline, per Leichtman, and more than a million of subscribers cutting their service from the same time period in 2018 (420,000). Consisting of the top 14 pay-TV services in the U.S. making up about 93% of the market, which includes satellite, cable, phone and vMVPDs. Satellite companies lost about 855,000 subscribers during Q2, with DirecTV accounting for 778,000 alone in its fifth...

Is Fox News trying to get ahead of the cord-cutting curve in a desperate move to boost its ratings? New York’s commie-loving mayor Bill de Blasio has found an unlikely soapbox for his 2020 presidential run: Fox News. If you happened to nod off and woke up to see de Blasio on Sean Hannity’s show last night, , you may have imagined you were having a nightmare. But that really was de Blasio pontificating at length about his radical plans for America and it really was Sean Hannity—not just providing him leeway but even joking with him.

The top 11 U.S. pay TV operators lost 2.87 million customers in 2018, nearly double the 1.5 million the domestic ecosystem shed in 2017. These are the latest quarterly findings by Leichtman Research Group (LRG), which measures the leading operators covering 95% of the U.S. market. The big negative drivers were the two satellite TV companies, DirecTV and Dish Network, which lost a ton of customers on the linear side, but this time couldn’t make up for it with gains by their low-margin virtual pay TV services. The two satellite carriers lost a combined 2.36 million linear customers in 2018,...

Hulu is bumping their prices by $5. They just broke $40 for their package + live TV. Only reason why I was getting live TV was local news. Can't do an antenna (Apt building). Anyone have any experience with other services? Sling, any others? Looking for Live TV as well.

It is not a pleasant time to be a cable company. Decades of regional monopolies are being swept away, leaving us with - the horror! - actual competition. Prices on streaming bundles are so low that companies are actually struggling to make money on the $40-a-month skinny services. Any time margins are so low that telecoms giants are complaining, you know that it’s good for consumers. Unsurprisingly, people are keen to ditch cable. While traditional pay TV is still the biggest distribution method by far, a pair of new studies out this week suggest that cord-cutting is about to hit...

In its latest forecast on U.S. pay TV and OTT (over-the-top) viewership, eMarketer projects that the number of those cutting the cord will grow faster than previously expected this year, while OTT viewership also outpaces projections. [Snip] According to eMarketer’s latest forecast on U.S. pay TV versus OTT, the number of those cutting the cord will climb 32.8% this year to 33 million, higher than the 22% growth rate (27.1 million) that was originally projected in July of 2017. This number represents the cumulative number of adults who have ever cancelled a pay TV service and have opted to continue...

According to a new study, subscriptions to streaming TV services exploded by 450 percent in less than a decade. This has resulted in surge of cord-cutting, those who cancel their cable or satellite packages (pay TV). The result is that pay TV household penetration has collapsed from a years-long hold of 75 percent, to just 63 percent in 2017. In 2009, only 10 percent of homes subscribed to a streaming TV service (Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, etc.). By 2017, that number surged to 55 percent, or a 450 percent increase.

from the we-don't-have-to-compete,-we're-the-cable-and-broadband-industry dept. What do you do when you're faced by an existential, evolutionary shift that threatens your entire, overly-comfortable industry? Why you raise rates, of course! Comcast is one of six cable providers who have informed customers that they've raised the rates for the new year, despite the record-setting shift toward cord cutting during 2017. Everything Comcast offers is seeing price hikes .., ranging from increases in the company's traditional channel bundles, a price increase for Comcast's standalone streaming platform, and even the fee charged for renting a modem (which is now $11 per month). Comcast's even jacking...

Research firm eMarketer cuts TV ad-spending forecast on accelerating pay-TV declines Winter is here for cable and satellite TV operators. American consumers are cancelling traditional pay-TV service at a much faster rate than previously expected, according to research firm eMarketer. In 2017, a total of 22.2 million U.S. adults will have cut the cord on cable, satellite or telco TV service to date — up 33% from 16.7 million in 2016 — the researcher now predicts. That’s significantly higher than eMarketer’s prior estimate of 15.4 million cord-cutters as of the end of this year. Meanwhile, the number of “cord-nevers” (consumers...

“As a business, it is failing,” said CEO of the American Cable Association (ACA), Matthew Polka, during an episode of C-SPAN Communicators this week. “It is very, very difficult for a cable operator in many cases to even break even on the cable side of the business, which is why broadband is so important, giving consumers more of a choice that we can’t give them on cable.”

I need some cable cutting help. Years ago, we got Dish network, which I am now dumping. I got Sling TV and a Roku box, which works great. I plan/hope to get local channels through a new antenna. I disconnected Dish and mounted and connected my new Channelmaster 45, right where my old antenna was. I live in the burbs, only a few miles from the major broadcast antenna and before we switched to Dish, the old antenna pulled in numerous channels. With the new Channelmaster, I only get a few channels (for you MN folks, I get TPT public...

Looking for advice on finally ditching very expensive Direct TV with hundreds of channels I DON'T watch.

It's been two days of harsh reckoning for the entertainment industry as long simmering concerns about declining pay-tv subscriptions boiled up in quarterly earnings reports, leading investors to dump shares of media stocks amid worries that a key Hollywood money pot is threatened. The massive sell-off — one analyst called it "the media meltdown" — came after Walt Disney Co. warned investors late Tuesday that profit from ESPN and other cable channels would not be as robust as initially thought because fewer consumers are subscribing to full pay-TV packages. The sell-off continued Thursday as Viacom disappointed Wall Street with weak...