“A new Pew Research Center report has found that one out of five young adults between 18 and 29 say they have ‘severed the ties they once had with cable or satellite service.’ They’ve cut the cord,” Bob Sullivan reports for GeekWire. “They used to pay every month for a TV package, and now they don’t. That’s startling. It’s even more startling than this other scary number: 16% of young adults say they’ve never, ever paid for cable or satellite TV. Overall, 24 percent of adults say they don’t pay for cable or satellite. Again, remarkably, 15 percent say they’ve canceled service.”
“Never doubt the ability of pay TV to piss off people, I guess. Firms like Comcast and Time Warner continually show up on lists of bad companies with bad service, even as prices continue to rise,” Sullivan reports. “If anyone needs a refresher in Aesop, it’s the pay TV industry. The golden geese are being slaughtered.”
“pay TV execs take note: The No. 1 reason people don’t pay is because pay TV is too expensive. Rather than degrade broadband service to win back consumers, how about offering better value instead? It’s already happening in some parts of the country. The newest rage in pay TV is called ‘cord shaving.’ Disgruntled consumers aren’t cutting the cord entirely, but opting for very, very slimmed down packages that cost $30 or less (also called ‘skinny’ TV),” Sullivan reports. “Why cable firms wouldn’t fall over themselves to turn cord-cutters into cord shavers — so they at least maintain some kind of financial relationship with consumers — I can’t imagine. But they’d better figure it out soon, or they’ll miss out on entire generation of consumers.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: 1 in 5 young U.S. adults have cut the cable or satellite cord – which bodes well for the deals required to finally bring Apple’s Internet TV service to life.
Keep cutting those cords, folks, and Eddy’s worries will soon be over. He’ll be undoing yet another button and breathing a sigh of relief as the content overlords obediently line up to sign on Apple’s dotted line.
SEE ALSO:
Apple cuts the cord on Internet TV plans – December 17, 2015
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