Will 2013 be the year in which streaming digital TV goes mainstream? The numbers are in, and it doesn't look good for traditional cable TV.
A 2012 study by the ISI Group confirmed that American viewers continued to ditch their cable TV subscriptions in favor of accessing high-speed streaming services. Instead of flipping through “whatever's on TV” every night, these cord-cutters are hooking up their smartphones, laptops and tablets to traditional TV screens or gaming devices and accessing their programming via the Internet.
Cutting the Cable Cord
If you peruse cable.TV, you'll see an average cable package that includes 100-plus channels runs about $70-100 a month. Experience shows that most viewers regularly watch only four or five. What streaming digital TV offers is the ability for viewers to watch the content they want, when they want it, using much-cheaper (starting at about $8 a month) services like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Apple TV, Roku and Slingbox. This may spell doom for cable operators, who are coming up with their own initiatives to prove their worth to current and potential subscribers.
They'd better hurry up. According to businessinsider.com, three of... Read more
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The War We Started Is Heating Up
This weekend, Fox stations began to disappear from the NY-based Cablevision system, which provides service to about 3 million homes. The rhetoric is about News Corp’s greed or about Cablevision’s unwillingness to fairly compensate News Corp for the value of their programming. That’s the battle, but not the war.
We are seeing more and more disputes between cable operators and networks over carriage fees. The reason for this is that ad-supported networks are preparing for the day when they can’t support the cost of programming through ad revenue. In fact, they already rely on carriage fees. But as more and more viewers look at cable only as a pipe filled with shows and live viewing dwindles, the audience is skipping the ads. As advertisers realize that so many of the impressions they are buying are being delivered but not seen, the advertising income line on a network’s balance sheet will soften. That loss will need to be made up somewhere else, and the most obvious else is carriage fees.
We have been studying the audience that is removing itself from interruptive advertising’s reach and it is a very large audience. They aren’t... Read more
