Posted on 09/04/2024 9:45:47 AM PDT by george76
Good news for the pay-TV industry, which suffered its worst quarter ever at the beginning of the year: The next three months were not quite as bad.
The pay-TV industry lost 1.6 million subscribers in Q2 2024.
While that's very bad, it's not a record.
But there doesn't seem to be any reason for those losses to stop.
Pay-TV distributors — that's conventional cable guys like Comcast, satellite TV outfits like DirecTV, and digital alternatives like YouTube TV — lost 1.6 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2024...
That's very bad! But not as bad as other Q2s, like in 2023, when the industry lost 1.7 million subscribers, or in 2022, when it lost 1.8 million subs.
And in other good news for the TV industry well, that's about it.
Those 1.6 million subscribers lost in the second quarter account for 6.9% of the industry's base, and there's no reason to think the slide is going to slow down at all, analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson write: "It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no longer any floor."
...
The companies behind Venu — Comcast, Disney, and Fox — have been arguing that their bundle of channels was going to appeal to people who didn't pay for cable TV.
...
But Moffett and Nathanson now doubt the Venu owners are going to end up fighting the lawsuit that has tabled their launch. That's because, like my colleague James Faris, they think the suit could end up blowing up the industry's long-standing practice of "bundling" channels together — which means that a cable TV distributor that wants to sell Disney's ESPN also has to sell Disney-owned channels like Disney or ABC in the same package.
And if that happened, things would totally collapse for the industry.
(Excerpt) Read more at africa.businessinsider.com ...
That’s a shame.
When your cable bill is higher than your electric bill, it’s time to quit.....................
the bundle is the worst
it forces you to fund channels you do not want
the solution is to offer a la carte
I wish we could go back to three channels only again. FREE. Get rid of all the sicko crap. There is way too much garbage hitting our kids on the boob tube. TV Land is nothing but a sewer from the wasteland of the planet.
“Cable TV”
by Weird Al Yankovic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WxbSK3yWaA
Maybe if they stopped charging people three hundred dollars a month for hundreds of channels of crap.
I don’t even understand the cable TV model anymore.
When it first came out, the appeal was you didn’t have advertisements all the time. You got interruption free programming.
Now, nearly every channel you pay for except the film teir is commercial television! If I am watching 55% “content” (if it rises to the level of being called that) and 45% advertising, WHY AM I PAYING FOR IT???
When I look into offers for just internet and then buy streaming channels, it all ends up costing just as much. And it doesn’t look like the entry level internet is enough for multiple devices on the wifi.
So the internet connection probably jumps to $80 and then you start adding channels and services like Netflix.
There are a lot of good movies sports and shows scattered all over. Max, Netflix, Apple (I don’t even have that one),Prime, etc.
They still have that coax network. Really fast. ATTAir is nowhere near the speed with it’s wireless. If catv loses it’s cash cow content they’ll have to raise rates just for maintenance.
Think solar roof panels feeding back into the grid. What they have left will still have to maintain the transmission lines.
If you have internet in your home, it is quite simple now to do without cable. When free to do so, people always flock to choice and flexibility.
I subscribe to Peacock for 30 days per year for the Indy 500 coverage. It’s a click or two and $6.99 this year I think. Many other examples for your personal needs.
We pay for “Live TV” with Hulu, but it’s going to be cut soon. There’s nothing on TV worth watching. My wife spends more time watching streaming services anyway. Good riddance.
I have streaming and internet with more shows and choices than I ever had…all for $60 a month. I’m surprised how many millennials still have cable…
What they have left will still have to maintain the transmission lines.
~~~
Not to take this on a tangent, but that’s why many States have laws that wont let you disconnect from the grid. They force you to keep your meter and will pay you for supplying energy to it, even if you could be self sufficient, but why? Probably for the same reasons that they force everyone onto water/sewer even if they have well/septic. It’s a “share the burden” mentality about public utilities that seems very socialistic to me that is very hypocritical to me when the utility companies make a profit.
The difference is that the cable company can’t claim it’s a public service let alone a utility. If they have to maintain their infrastructure, that’s their problem, and it’s harder to convince (and donate their way in) the politicians that it should be mandated in any way.
This is the reason why the big cable companies like Spectrum are pushing their zone WIFI internet and phone service garbage. They have to try to use their grid for something else because they know people don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars to have BET, TeenNik, ESPN4, Cleo, or Discovery Familia all bundled into pay-for tears when they can just search for something to stream that THEY ACTUALLY WANT TO WATCH.
for the rest I bought an Apple TV box. If I feel like paying for it, I can hook up a Hulu, Philo, or Sling and get bundled TV. Tubi for old tv or movies has a free version, Amazon Prime has some stuff and I pay for Prime annually anyway. You can also do subscription add-ons like History Vault, Masterpiece, even NFL or MLB. My only issue is the local sports. They are still tied into a cable package and I haven’t been able to find any way to buy just diamondbacks baseball without paying an outrageous price. I can get FSN through Hulu, but I stopped using them when their pricing shot up to $80 a month. They claim there is no floor to the drop, but there is also no ceiling to their pricing, and I won’t pay to keep CNN in business.
Ok, so we all have different taste. I loved the History channel because it was mostly war history with WWII the most then some WWI and Vietnam thrown in and mail call. Then they did away with that and went to Ice road truckers, storage wars and pawn shop stuff, cool shows for some but not history. But alas, I was offered the Military history channel “, after a short while they went to ballistics testing shows and shooting competitions. Again, with 300 channels, there is plenty of space for that, but it’s not Military history. After that, we just slowly stopped watching until we dropped cable. Even the producers of shows with countless options can’t even produce a consistent program to match the name.
I’m 54 years old and have never owned a TV (except by happenstance - won one at a drawing that I gave away, and an RV had one that we never used). I’ve never felt like I was missing anything. Had a VCR hooked up to a Mac Quadra in the early 90’s as a young adult to watch Christian tapes and then the WWW came along in 1997 and made the whole notion of needing a TV to stay informed an absurdity.
How many people would actually PAY for CNN fake news if it weren’t bundled onto the channel lineup?
The same with MSNBC, PBS, etc. The Puppet Biden regime would have to figure out a different way to distribute their propaganda.
“57 channels and there’s nothin’ on....”
Spectrum’s rate is already through the roof, but just to put a fine point on it they raised their rate $4.
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