Tag Archives: Cable television

December 14, 2015 · 11:42 am

Pro Choice

I never had cable TV until I moved into New York City after college.  You needed the cable there because the big buildings interfered with the over-the-air signal.  Suddenly, a new world opened up, as I had access to several more channels, including HBO.

Cable tv

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I had more choice, and I was all for it.  Apparently, I wasn’t the only one either. Cable television contributed to the substantial drop in the broadcast network viewing from 1983 to 1994 when weekly broadcast audience shares dropped from 69 to 52 while basic cable networks’ shares rose from 9 to 26 during the same period according to A. C. Nielsen.  What had been a 6 or 7 channel universe now had almost 40!  100 channels was a dream for down the road and today’s world over several hundred channels seemed impossible.  But of course, as The Boss reminds us, there were 57 channels and nothing on.

Fast forward to today.  Our T/V (television/video) choices are unlimited.  The only real choice we need to make is who is going to do the programming – us or the channel’s programming department.  When we do it, we can watch what we want when we choose to do so.  We can binge on an entire season over a day and we probably won’t have to be interrupted by nearly as much advertising.  Allowing the channel to program our viewing means that those of us who don’t choose to make a decision about programming need not.  We can watch T/V as it traditionally was done – passively.

This changed environment has led to cord-cutters and cord-nevers.  After all, when 75% of people just want a “light” package of channels, paying more for the hundred the cable company chooses to carry seems silly.  As eMarketer predicts:

In 2015, there will be 4.9 million US households that once paid for TV services but no longer do, a jump of 10.9% over last year. And that growth will accelerate in the coming years, with the number of cord-cutting households jumping another 12.5% in 2016. In fact, by the end of next year, the number of US households subscribing to cable and satellite will drop below 100 million…Also noteworthy, the share of viewers who have never subscribed to cable or satellite (“cord-nevers”) is growing as well. This year, the percentage of US adults who have never subscribed to cable or satellite TV will reach 12.9%. That share will grow to 13.8% by 2016.

I have no doubt the cable providers will innovate – allowing you to upgrade your TV, for example, as the wireless carriers do your phone, bundling in streaming music, or changing their business emphasis entirely to being broadband providers (BYO Programming!).  But it’s going to be an interesting transition in the pro-choice video world.  You agree?

 

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November 9, 2015 · 10:00 am

Batman In Half The Time

It’s Monday, and one of my little treats on Monday evenings, prior to football, is watching Gotham.  It’s a prequel to the Batman story with which most of us are familiar.  As a subscriber to the philosophy that one should always be Batman, it’s must-see TV for me.  Unfortunately, last Monday, I was engaged in a client phone call and couldn’t watch the show.  In an on-demand world, that’s really not a big deal.  In addition to the on-demand service my cable provider offers, I am a Hulu subscriber.  Catching up on the missed episode happened the next night, and while I was watching it a little light went on. I’d like to share my thought with you and see what you think.

My former colleagues in television bemoan the shift of viewing to streaming sources.  They think it has to do with convenience or maybe with some cord cutting.  That may be true, but as I was watching Gotham, this is what dawned on me:

Gotham on Fox – 60 minutes. Gotham on Hulu – 33 minutes.

We wonder why people are watching alternative sources?  Its’s the same reason people use ad blockers.  It’s a faster, less cluttered experience.  The thing that drew us to whatever we are doing is constantly being interrupted. Ads are not why we watch.  They’re our part in the attention/value exchange.  Unfortunately, that equation has become unreasonably weighted to broadcast and cable television providers, who are making excessive demands for our attention.  If I can get my Batman fix in half the time, the few bucks a month that it costs is well worth it.

Having been a publisher as well as involved in broadcast programming, I understand the pressures for monetization.  The problem now, however, is that the uniqueness of nearly every channel has been stripped away.  The content that made a channel unique is everywhere, and in general,  consumers will access that content with as few distractions as possible.  Annoyed consumers will seek out channels that are less annoying.

It’s not just TV.  If site A offers me news or scores or stats with a healthy dose of auto-start video, pop-ups, and full-screen takeovers, I can assure you that I’ll find a site that offers that content in a less-monetized environment.   If I can enjoy one of my guilty pleasures in half the time, why wouldn’t I?  Hulu and Fox both show ads, both show promotional spots, and both show the same program.  Fox, obviously, chose to show a lot more non-program material.  That may have paid their bills in the near term, but in the future, I’ll be watching on Hulu, so I guess it ultimately was a bad choice.

Why are people moving to other channels?  Do you really need to ask?

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October 21, 2015 · 9:02 am

Never Never Land

I paid my cable TV bill the other day.  It’s a lot of money each month but the fact that the amount also covers my high-speed internet access and office phone mitigates the expenditure, I guess.  I know my kids don’t see it the same way, and from a lot of the numbers that researchers are reporting, neither do their peers. 

Consumers are shutting off their cable and satellite TV connections in droves.  Nearly half a million subscribers did so in the second quarter, according to the folks at  Leichtman Research Group Inc.  The cable guys will tell you that it’s really a drop in the bucket and they’re right.  49 million folks still have those cable connections and another 34 million have satellite dishes.  So what’s the big to-do?  Those drops have the potential to run into a flood if you look inside the numbers and at how people are watching as well.

Take a look at some information put forward by the Forrester folks in their recent study of cord-nevers.  As explained by this piece in Digital Trends:

Based on a recent survey of 32,000 adults conducted by data analysis firm Forrester Research, roughly 18 percent of Americans have never actually subscribed to premium TV service through a cable or satellite company. While the majority of those respondents were at least age 32 and over, about seven percent of ‘cord-never’ Americans are between the ages of 18 and 31; a prime marketing demographic for advertisers.

Furthermore, the growth rate of cord-nevers suggests that roughly 50 percent of Americans under the age of 32 will have never subscribed to a premium TV service by the time we reach 2025. That’s a massive segment of the population that will be turning to digital delivery services rather than calling up their local cable company for a stack of set-top boxes and a hefty monthly bill.

I’ve stated before that I believe the TV distributors we have will trade the program pipes they have today for internet pipes tomorrow.  Rather than spending money paying fees to the program distributors, they’d be far better served spending the money to upgrade their pipes and building better connections to move video to their subscribers.  While today’s college kids (and tomorrow’s consumers) don’t know a world without high-speed internet access, as cord-nevers they won’t miss the cable subscription.  They might also just be the customers today’s marketers think have gone missing unless they rethink their use of traditional TV.

Cable and satellite subscriptions aren’t going away any time soon, but the one size fits all bundle of program services is.  It will have to in order to retain the consumers who now program their own viewing.  With a minority of viewing to entertainment programs happening live, the operative word will be choice and control.  Consumers expect that along with their monthly bill, and it will be interesting to see if the cable and satellite guys are listening.

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