“Disruption theory suggests that once a product over-serves on meaningful bases of value creation (and underserves on value) it opens the door to disruption,” Horace Dediu writes for Asymco. “Which leads me to ask not whether cable is past its prime but rather why it’s still around?”
“My answer is that disruption is predictable. Users are cutting cords, the ‘uncabled’ or ‘never-cabled’ are a significant portion of the population. 13.5% of broadband households with an adult under 35 have no pay-TV subscriptions. 8.6 million US households have broadband Internet but no pay-TV subscription. That’s 7.3% of households, up from 4.2% in 2010. Another 5.6 million households ‘are prime to be among the next wave of cord-cutters,’ according to Experian,” Dediu writes. “And so it goes. A business dies first slowly then quickly.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Let the deluge begin (as soon as Apple has their Internet TV service available)!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brian” for the heads up.]
Can’t wait for AppleTV to get there premium skinny bundle together….I’m sick of the 500 channel bundle to get 20 channels I acutally use……………………………
Yeah but, you will probably pay close to what you do now with apples offering. They don’t do cheap
But they do value. Life is short, get the good stuff.
You and I have had contention over your assertion previously. I entirely agree that the Media Oligarchy will, as ever, do their damnedest to gouge their victims. But thanks to the Internet and good old off-air TV, right now, I don’t care. I have more FREE great media to access, right now, than I have time to watch. And it’s hella better stuff than the crap Time Warner Cable was foisting at me. Better picture, better variety, actual à la carte viewing of at least half of what I watch. The Media Oligarchy HATE that, and I LOVE IT.
Good comment trolldude. That was not only respectful but also relevant. You are progressing nicely. Keep it up and try not to backslide.
Ever heard of iTunes Match? How about iCloud? Apple TV? I could go on…
I haven’t had cable TV since about a year after the Apple TV came out. I’ve only missed it on a couple of occasions, a SuperBowl or two, and when a big news event was transpiring. But now that doesn’t matter because you can stream via Air Play from your phone. I’m shocked the uptake in cable-cutting has been so slow. Cable just absolutely sucks, and the price is ludicrous.
I suppose if I watched the 5 hours of TV per day that the average American does, I might not have cut the cable so soon. But with no undue offense intended, Americans, you deserve the Idiocracy you elect due to your immense FOX Spews viewership.
The people who still have cable and are “happily” (I guess) paying $130/month for it fall into two groups: Baby Boomers who can’t imagine life without cable television, and younger males who can’t imagine life without live sports.
More than a bit of an oversimplification of the situation, in my opinion, Jooop.
“Average Americans”…”deserve idiocracy”? Yes, in your twisted mind, the rest of the world is better. Would you truly like to debate the world’s history of dictators and despots – all from outside of the USA?
I suspect that you’d love living in some country that derives its complete sense of purpose by yelling “Death to America” ad nauseam. So why don’t you just move there? Just think of how happy you’d be treating women like dogs, all the while ranting continuously about how much hate you have for the USA.
And your idiotic comment about “Fox Spews”: so Fox News is responsible for getting President Obama elected? Makes. No. Sense.
To be fair, the U.S. supported some of those dictators and despots.
The “Fox Spews” label is a bit humorous and, unfortunately, all too accurate. And you can gripe about the current POTUS all you want, but electing any of the candidates favored by the Spew might very well have been worse.
It depends on customer selection of the basic package not the vendor selection.😳
Peek Cabal
I have DirecTV, but only because I want the NFL Ticket and the RedZone channel. I haven’t figured out how to get all my pro football live any other way. As soon as I can buy it a la carte, I’ll be all done with all of it.
HERE ya go
Cable-free since 2012 and happy about it. Good riddance to the 7-minute commercial breaks and ridiculous bundling that forces me to pay for (and therefore subsidize) channels that I never watch and don’t like, such as Oxygen, Lifetime, ESPN and Fox News. If cable had let me choose just the channels I want, they might have been able to keep me. Now it’s too late. Even if they offered a-la-carte tomorrow I wouldn’t take it, because I’m totally happy with Netflix, Hulu Plus and Youtube, plus an antenna to pull in ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, Fox and CW over the air in full HD for free.
With all of what’s available to me with internet streaming and over-the-air, if I still can’t find anything to watch, then I really don’t want to watch TV.
Where I live, Time Warner Cable is desperately bombing the airwaves (as in off-air TV) with outrageously deceptive, con-job, suck-in-the-suckers advertisements for their abysmal cable services.
I could not be more pleased to be part of the tidal wave of cable cutting that is washing TWC into red ink. It’s as if the faerie tale called ‘Justice’ is coming true.
From a year ago:
Time Warner Cable: More Of
The Same Old Customer Abuse Strategy
This specific bandwidth capping and price gouging of customers is alive and hell at TWC. Cut their cable? Gladly. √Done.
Oh, you don’t think TWC is desperate to regain customers? They’re Ad Slamming, aka bombing viewers with two TWC ads in a row. The only way TWC could get more desperate would be to Ad Blast, aka cram up the audio volume, their advertisements. Thankfully, that’s now illegal. As a company gets desperate, their marketing ethics get thrown out the window.
You think Time Warner’s Cable TV is bad? Try their waking nightmare they call internet service. The way they make you share bandwidth with your entire neighborhood made their service completely unusable after 7pm when everybody was home. Oh yeah, it was fine at 1pm on a Tuesday, but in the evenings I couldn’t even stream a youtube video.
A technician would come out during the day on a weekday, do a bunch of tests and tell me that everything was fine, so I know it wasn’t the line quality. It was their piss-poor infrastructure and bandwidth management that couldn’t cope with people being home and actually using the service.
When AT&T U-Verse came to my neighborhood, I literally had the U-Verse guy clip and pull out the Time Warner Cable cable from my yard. I told him there was no way Time Warner was ever getting back into my house.
Time Warner Cable still sends reps to my door periodically. As soon as I see the logo on their shirts I tell them there’s no way I’m ever having Time Warner Cable again and I ask them to leave.
If Apple thinks for one moment that their stripped down and tremendously overpriced offering is any good, they’re sadly mistaken like the rest of them.
Personally until the whole bloated package is south of 20 bucks, they can count me out. HBO for 15 bucks a month by itself? Dream on little dreamers, lmao.
Interesting numbers!
here is a simple solution to this problem: get cable tv companies to do two things: 1) get rid of the “extra box charge”- charge by the month for the first 8-10 months for the cost of the hardware and give it to the customer for free 2) the real problem here is that network owners want to “bundle their channels”- if you want ESPN you must take ABC. Ok fair enough but MAKE IT SO customers can delete that channel from their box. That’s so you don’t have to slew through 50 channels to get to the one you want. Customer’s would still pay for it. Networks would quickly get the idea.
It is about eyeballs. Networks think they don’t like this idea, but what they are really doing is getting their customers mad. Cable TV think that can nickel and dime customers- that too is just getting customers mad. I know that I’m paying an extra $240 over the course of my 2 year contract then I was expecting. This is an extra month and a half. The result of all this: as time goes on I’m closer and closer to cutting the cord. Then CATV and Networks get NOTHING.
Comcast needs to do what I’m saying and then transform themselves into a broadband delivery service. In future people will want two things: either series of programs at once (all the “big bang theory” episodes at once for example) and access to ALL Football or Baseball games for their favorite team the whole season plus all playoff games. Trying to get customers to do something different isn’t going to work for long.
When broadband cable internet was first rolled out, providers portrayed it as an interim technology intended to fill the gap until large-scale fibre optic networks could be built. Now, 20 years later, we’re still waiting for the widespread availability of fibre optic networks. Instead of making good on their promise, those lazy, greedy internet service providers simply pocketed their profits year and year and basically did absolutely nothing to advance the technology until very recently.