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TV subscribers are ditching their cable companies at an ever faster rate in the past few months, and many of them aren’t signing up with a satellite or phone competitor instead.
Their willingness to simply go without pay television could be a sign that Internet TV services such as Netflix and Hulu are finally starting to entice people to cancel cable, though company executives say the weak economy and housing market are to blame.
Third-quarter results reported this week by major cable and satellite TV companies show major losses, but don’t settle the question of what’s causing them.
If “cord-cutting” in favor of Internet video is finally taking hold, that has wide-ranging implications. Consumers who use the Internet to get their movies and TV shows bypass not just the cable companies, but the cable networks that produce the content. The move could have the same disruptive effect on the TV and movie industries as digital downloads have already had on music.
A few weeks ago, the CEO of phone company Verizon Communications Inc. likened cord-cutting to what started happening to the local-phone companies five or six years ago, when people started giving up their landlines in favor of relying solely on their cell phones.
“The first thing when that happens is you deny it,” Ivan Seidenberg said.
On Thursday, Time Warner Cable Inc.’s chief operating officer, Landel Hobbs, said the company doesn’t see evidence of people dropping cable in favor of the Internet. He said the biggest subscriber losses have been among people who don’t have cable broadband services; high-speed Internet—from cable or a competitor—is key to watching video online. These people seem to be going to satellite or giving up on pay TV entirely.
On the theory that college students might be among the first to drop cable TV, the company looked at changes in subscriber figures in college towns such as Austin, Texas, and Columbus, Ohio. They weren’t out of line with previous years, and they corresponded to the level of student enrollment, he said.
Time Warner Cable lost 155,000 video subscribers in the July-September quarter, compared with 64,000 a year ago.
The only larger cable company, Comcast Corp., reported last week that its subscriber loss more than doubled in the third quarter, to 275,000. Comcast said many of those leaving had taken advantage of low introductory rates that the company offered last year when the analog TV broadcast network was shut down.
Of the satellite companies, DirecTV gained subscribers and Dish Network Corp. lost them. On a conference call Friday, Dish CEO Charlie Ergen said the Internet was making itself noticed as a competitor.
The country’s eight largest publicly traded pay-TV companies, representing about 85 percent of the subscriber total, had reported their results for the third quarter by Friday. These cable, phone and satellite companies showed a combined gain of 66,700 video subscribers, or a 0.3 percent increase at an annualized rate, about a third the growth of the population.
The figure was a slight recovery from the seasonally weak second quarter, when they gained just 12,400 subscribers. But it’s far short of the 401,300 subscribers gained a year ago.
Missing from the tally is the third-largest cable company, Cox Communications, which is privately held and doesn’t report subscriber counts publicly. If it lost cable subscribers at the same rate as Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the nine largest pay-TV companies had zero net gain for the latest quarter and lost subscribers in the second.
Cable companies have been losing video subscribers for some time, but they have been compensating by upgrading basic subscribers to more expensive digital tiers, as well as adding broadband and phone subscribers.
However, both Time Warner Cable and Cablevision Systems Corp. lost digital video subscribers in the third quarter. Both added record-low number of phone subscribers, as years of growth are coming to an end.
Meanwhile, Netflix Inc.’s streaming service has become so popular that it is now the largest source of U.S. Internet traffic during peak evening hours, according to Sandvine Inc., a Canadian company that supplies traffic-management equipment to Internet service providers.
A variety of gadgets can send Netflix’s streams to the living room TV, including game consoles and the $99 Apple TV box. Many high-end TVs now come with the built-in ability to play Internet content.
Thomas Clancy Jr., 35, in Long Beach, N.Y., canceled the family’s Cablevision subscription this spring. He said he has been happy with Netflix and other Internet video services since then, even though there isn’t a lot of live sports to be had online.
“The amount of sports that I watched certainly didn’t justify a hundred-dollar-a-month expense for all this stuff. I mean, that’s $1,200 a year,” Clancy said.
But Clancy is also an example of the hurdles cord cutters face. He uses an Internet-connected Blu-ray player to get Netflix movies to the TV. And he pulls a cable from his computer to the TV for Internet content Netflix doesn’t have. Clancy is tech-savvy enough to do all that. Most people wouldn’t know how.
Most people who have the technological skills to take advantage of Internet video find that the selection of movies and shows isn’t broad enough to make the jump worth it, Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett said.
On the other hand, poor people have an excellent motive to cut cable and simply replace it with an antenna or nothing at all, he said.
Cable companies would like to get low-income customers back with cheaper cable packages, but their hands are tied. Content providers such as The Walt Disney Co. and News Corp. won’t license their channels one by one, so subscribers have to take big, expensive channel packages, or very basic ones, which offer little beyond what’s available with an antenna.
Content providers now get billions of dollars in fees from cable service providers, and they want to make sure that whatever new industry model comes along, they’ll get paid. It’s not obvious yet that Internet video will let them sustain their profit levels.
Six companies create the content that consumes 85 percent of U.S. viewing hours, Moffett said. “Until they get on board, the train’s not leaving the station.”
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