“Cable will soon be dead”
Cable TV is losing subscribers heavily but it will be hard to kill it.
The reason is that many apartment buildings and homeowners associations have hard-wired cable TV and (most importantly) charge a discounted fee as part of the rent or association fees.
Even if the residents “cut the cord” they still have to pay for it. If they stream they end up paying twice for the same programs.
Streaming has problems of its own—it is very difficult for companies to make money with a la carte choices and/or instant disconnects at the discretion of the consumer.
The entire entertainment/sports industry are going to face a very interesting future—something has got to give....
The money for cable companies is in delivering internet. As the number of subscribers goes down the per cable channel costs increases. That increases the overall cable bill for subscribers and the more people cut the cord. ESPN is the prime example of business go wrong. They have committed to multi-billion dollar sports contracts while cable subscribership tanks. They post loss after loss each year.
The move will be to streaming sports in the future. The seeds are already planted. For college football, conferences have their own streaming apps with content from universities, FOX or ESPN. The networks carry the big football and basketball games. Eventually, it will be in the interest of college football conferences to stream their games only and take the revenue from streaming subscriptions. The same will happen with pro sports. There are apps for the NFL, NHL, MLB and more. Why give networks a cut when leagues can do it theirselves?
I have cable - Spectrum. It’s expensive but I’m old school. I don’t like streaming - I like watching on my regular TV. I have a bundle - TV/internet/phone. AT&T was cheaper but they kept turning my power off saying I hadn’t paid when I had. When I’d call I only spoke to foreign customer service workers who never would credit my account so I cancelled and never looked back.
I learned something interesting in reading about the Charter (Spectrum) -Disney Brewha. I thought Spectrum had a massive market share in the US.
Charter Facts: By the Numbers
56 Million. Homes Passed in 41 States.
32 Million. Customer Relationships.
30.6 Million. Broadband Internet Customers.
14.7 Million. Video Subscribers.
8.5 Million. Voice Subscribers.
6.6 Million. Mobile Lines.
Turns out 15 million of their subscribers don’t actually subscribe to TV service and they only serve probably a 10th of the country’s households with TV.
I could not find a chart of all of the companies and thie breakdown by services. BTW, this actually comes right off Charter’s website so they do not consider proprietary information.