Media Companies Panic as Customers Ditch Cable TV
This is a no brainer. Personally, we canceled our Comcast cable a few months ago, and now only pay for wifi and use Apple TV to watch movies, shows, etc. Apparently, we’re not the only ones.
Cord-cutting is gaining steam.
Pay-TV services recorded their biggest-ever quarterly drop in subscribers, losing 625,000 TV customers, according to a report Thursday from the research firm SNL Kagan.
While about 100.4 million households still pay for traditional pay TV, the report underscored investors’ fears that cord-cutting is gaining momentum and starting to fray the TV industry’s business model.
Those fears led to a sell-off in media stocks last week, with entertainment companies losing more than $60 billion in value over two days. Top program suppliers such as Walt Disney Co., Time Warner Inc. and Viacom Inc., which rely on subscriber fees and advertising for their revenue, were hard hit.
So-called cord cutters are dropping pay-TV packages that cost an average $87 a month in favor of online services from Netflix Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. priced at under $10. That’s led to falling viewership at many cable networks, hurting ad sales and threatening to reduce subscriber fees.
http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2015/08/14/media-companies-panic-as-customers-ditch-cable-tv/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-13/cord-cutting-accelerates-as-pay-tv-sees-record-subscriber-losses