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 ...
I got a deal on Peacock a couple of months ago, $19.99 for a year and I took it.
Yeah too bad.
Glad I have no TV.
Gaslighting and Brainwashing not allowed in my house.
We read a lot.
Bait and switch long game. Didn’t work on me cuz I’m old enough to remwmber.
I don’t understand, my first recollection of Cable TV was in the early 1970s when my Grandmother got cable in a small central Florida town where the nearest Network television station was 70 miles away, making it nearly impossible to get TV.
She got a handful of commercial channels like NBC, CBS, ABC, etc., all in crystal clear black and white TV, every one of the channels had commercials.
If you paid extra, you could get HBO and it was commercial free, but every other channel on early cable TV all had advertisements.
You are paying for it because it costs a lot of money to lay cable everywhere, put satellites into space and in order to attract a large enough audience to pay for it all, they need a large variety of TV channels.
Next streaming services come along and offer ala carte TV and that is all the rage, the problem is, most if not all of the streaming services are losing massive amounts of money because they don’t offer a wide enough range of programming choices to draw enough people to become profitable.
In order to match Cable or Direct TV packages you may have to subscribe to multiple streaming services and when you add up the cost it approaches the cost of Direct Tv or cable service, not to mention the cumbersome nature of switching between streaming services for most people.
Both the cable/satellite model and the streaming models will have to change.
Cable/Satellite services will have to unbundle and offer smaller less expensive bundles tailored to someone’s interests, like a sports package, news package, movie package and you can choose a couple and have a much more affordable cost.
The streaming services are going to have to do much the same thing, bundle several services together and offer a wider range of programming that appeals to enough people to make them profitable.
Fired them forever the next day.
Upon asking to end service was offered $29.99 locked in for 2 years for 100MB, also since I do auto-billpay they took another $10 a month off($19.99 for 1 year, then $29.99 for 2nd).
Day before I made the call I did an online speedtest...showed about 115-120mb download/10+mb upload...even though I supposedly had 300mb service. When I called, and csa offered the promo to retain, I told her that and she said it may have been due to older modem/router, so along with the promo she had them send me a new modem + router at no additional charge(we'll see).
Both were delivered next day and setup was easy enough. After I had everything up and running did another online speedtest(after supposedly downgrading from 300mb service to 100mb promo)...all devices connected was same 115 to 120mb...not noticing any slowdown.
AM radio and the Internet are all we use nowadays. The rest of the media is Communist garbage coming out the leftist Hollywood s**t bucket. And movies? IMO they’re absolutely horrible, a huge waste of time.
And we subscribe to NOTHING.☺
You are paying for it because it costs a lot of money to lay cable everywhere, put satellites into space and in order to attract a large enough audience to pay for it all, they need a large variety of TV channels.
~~~
In the 1970’s we knew an electronics repair man who had a satellite dish in his yard. Back then it wasn’t one of those 18” dishes, these were probably 5ft in diameter. He got “cable” for free (even though it was satellite). I call it cable because it included HBO.
How?
Because back then they didn’t scramble the signal.
The satellites were already up there, because all of the networks were already sending their signals all over the country, mostly to affiliate network broadcast stations!
Saying that they had to pay to put satellites up is a fallacy in my opinion. They were already there, although I realize that they probably had to put up a lot more in order to scramble the signal and create a business model based on subscription access (artificial scarcity).
In another post I noted my first interaction with cable TV was in the early 70s, I don’t remember a single time ever hearing that TV would be commercial free, at that time even with cable you only got a handful of channels they were all network channels like NBC, CBS, ABC, etc.
You paid for it even with the commercials because that was your only way to get clear reception on a regular basis.
If you didn’t live near a major city and could get TV with Rabbit Ears you didn’t get TV unless you invested in a really high antenna system with a rotor that could move the direction of antenna to point to a different city.
I grew up out in the country about 70 miles from the nearest commercial TV station, we had a really high antenna on the house locked down with multiple guy wires, with a rotor on top so we could change the direction of the antenna from Jacksonville, FL to Orlando, FL.
Even today, millions of people live remotely and have zero chance to get cable TV, their only choices over the years have been the Big Oval Dishes or smaller Directv and Dish Network dishes.
Until recently high-speed internet for streaming services were not available everywhere.
In order to watch TV, these people had to pay for service thru a Satellite company and for most they still do today.
” offer a la carte”
I have ROKU TV. I get tons of FREE channels. (You Tube, Rumble, and hundreds more)
I subscribe to/pay for networks I like. NETFLIX, AMAZON (comes free with my Amazon Prime membership), PHILO/REELZ (for On Patrol Live), HULU, Discovery, BRIT BOX, and a couple more. Mostly WITHOUT commercials.
Having dropped DIRECT TV I can more than afford the channels I like. (AND watch TV when it rains) T-MOBILE INTERNET ($50.00 a month). Hey, We LIKE TV.
My family had one of those BUDs (big ugly dishes) initially you could get anything you wanted unscrambled, didn’t have to pay for anything, that quickly changed, and everything became scrambled unless you subscribed to a service, with the BUDs, you had to move the dish to point to different satellites to get different programming.
The beauty of Directv and Dish Network when they were announced, is a much smaller dish pointed in one direction and get all the channels you could ever want, Directv has 6-7 satellites up there beaming local and cable channels directly to millions of people. That costs a ton of money to launch and pay for a satellite network even if it’s only a handful of satellites.
Years ago on the west coast they were billing it as commercial free. We found about 8 years ago these criminals who run the cable/media companies were charging an elderly relative of ours nearly $300 per month after hustling them with their predator advertising directed at the elderly. We fix that and saved them lots of money.
Fact is most people have wised up to the media/cable industry! Most of it is Whitey bad, America bad, socialism/Communism good. Eff them all!
People, especially the younger generation, have so many options today for entertainment - that doesn’t involve cable TV.
Between video games, YouTube, the web itself, etc., how many hours a day are you going to watch cable TV with fixed scheduled programming.
The *only* area I can think of is live sports and even that has options. I’m a Detroit Red Wings fan, cable TV is, almost, the only option - it’s at least the most convenient. That said, it wasn’t worth the $100+ per month just for that.
Cable TV is a dinosaur gasping for air, same goes for ‘cable news’.
And they got really greedy over the years...It's been about 14 years now since we severed all that BS.
I put up the biggest antenna that I could buy on the roof of my two-story house. I can pull in 62 channels for free. That is plenty for me. I sure as heck don’t need 7-8 ESPN stations. Who in the heck wants to watch people sitting around the table playing poker, people throwing darts, and people playing beanbag toss!? And by the way people, do some research on the meaning of “Cornhole” because you will never refer to the game that way again.
Streaming is the way to go.
I stream via T-Mobile Home Internet for 50 a month.
Data is unlimited but they may “throttle” down your speeds if you hit 1.2 gigs of usage in month.
I have never used that much.
With the TMHI subscription T-Mobile gives me the MLB TV out of market package which sells for 150.
I subscribe to MHZ Choice which I got for four dollars a month on a yearly deal.
I took the Peacock deal at 19.99 a month.
If you have never tried a FAST service you may be surprised at what they offer.
Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television like Tubi, Pluto, and Plex have a lot of content.
Plex has the best search engine as you can search using titles, stars or directors and its results list available services other than Plex.
I’m thinking about getting the orange skinny bundle from Sling TV to watch college football as it has most of the SEC games.
Downside to that package is you can only stream on one device at a time.
I cut the cable in 2016 and have been streaming ever since.
Of course, I have a good working antenna system for OTA.
Those “free” channels still exist. You can use an ordinary antenna and a digital tv to get them. I get 30+ in my area. I was using a 15 year old flat screen before I was given a new smart tv (that I rarely use) this year.
Thanks!!!!
Bookmarking***
-> broadcast TV antenna listing.
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