400,000 American Homes Have Dumped Pay TV This Year 333
redkemper writes "More than 400,000 American homes have cut the cord and ditched their cable and satellite pay-TV services since the start of 2012. The figure includes 169,000 subscribers shed by Time Warner Cable last quarter, marking the service provider's tenth consecutive quarter of customer losses. It also includes the 52,000 net subscribers DirecTV lost this past quarter, and 176,000 customers who left Comcast."
It would have counted me too (Score:5, Interesting)
...but for some reason my cable/internet provider charges less for 10Mbps when it's also packaged with their basic cable than they do when it's by itself. So, I gladly accepted their $8/month credit to add basic cable, and I simply unplugged the cable from my TV as soon as the cable guy had left. Strange thing is, this isn't a special as part of signing up with a contract, since I have no contract with them.
I really don't get how they do their accounting, and I'm beginning to think they don't either since they're losing so many customers.
Re:Please Find Alternative Ways to Our Money (Score:4, Interesting)
I really hope some of the companies out there (HBO especially, I needs my Game of Thrones fix) figure out other ways of getting money from customers. I wouldn't want to see the shows I like cut back or eliminated if the tv/cable networks go the way of newspapers. So, dear cable/tv companies: We have money, we want to support your art. Let's figure something out!
I.e., don't be douche bags and try to tie your loyal fans into antiquated distribution methods that we, the consumers who drive the economy and thus are your bottom line, have repeatedly and soundly rebuffed.
Re:And yet (Score:3, Interesting)
Youtube is more original, cheaper, easier, and... (Score:3, Interesting)
...interactive.
Honestly, other than live sports broadcasts, paid TV is crap. HBO and Showtime have good shows they put out, but I don't need to see them first-air, and they don't play relatively-recent movie releases anymore on those channels.
Cable Television used to be the best thing ever. It used to be you would see amazing amounts of programming that were simply unavailable through traditional networks. This content existed because the major networks had frankly rejected a lot of good ideas. Well those great ideas turned into formulas in a mature industry, formulas that are now followed without deviation. The Discovery channel used to pick up all the untouched NOVA ideas and it was awesome, now when I turn on the multitude of science/engineering channels I'm left to try to not punch my television into pieces because it's telling me that Egypt was built by aliens. The comedy channel used to be almost 24-hour-a-day stand up routines, which was fantastic, it changed from that a long time ago. Thankfully the cartoon network is still the lone shining beacon of basic cable that still provides true entertainment, but it's the only one at this point.
Cable died because they got cheap, they went low-margin-formulaic on their content generation, and hence their content is essentially all crap.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, duh! (Score:5, Interesting)
TW charges too much, keeps pushing their prime channels to higher priced tiers, and refuses to offer als carte programming to customers.
Comcast is no better than TW, and to add salt to the wound they spy on their customers for the government and the MAFIAA.
DirecTV has poor service, fails to deliver product, and screws customers for cancelling services [lawyersand...ements.com]. I had them for 4 weeks with the promise of internet service. No one installed the internet service. After being passed around DirecTV phone support for 90 minutes, I cancelled my service because they failed to deliver. And I STILL had to pay a $135 early termination fee, despite not signing any contractual agreement.
The industry is getting greedy and corrupt, and consumers are tired of it. Very soon my parents will join the exodus.
Re:I did... (Score:5, Interesting)
One day I realized I was neglecting my wife, my hobbies, my chores around the house, etc. We got rid of pay cable when Turner Classic Movies was taken off of extended analog and put on to digital, which was one of the few networks that we actually cared to specifically watch.
We went without pay TV for years, and bought our DTV decoder boxes like everyone else, and I rediscovered many of the actually good vintage shows on RTN and Me and other networks. Just recently I started playing with XBMC, and I wholly recommend it. I threw together a junk PC from parts laying around and hooked it into the component inputs on our widescreen HD tube TV, and now we can watch hundreds of "channels" worth of free content from PBS, several cable networks, Vimeo, Youtube, and lots and lots of other sources. They seem to be without commercials too.
Now we can watch what we want, when we want, and can pursue our hobbies without having to interrupt just to watch a stupid TV show.
I'm watching Netflix right now (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I did... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, I just don't watch TV anymore. Last time I regularly watched TV was during STNG, around 1990. They had a few awful episodes during the 7th season, and I tuned out and never came back. I have seen only a few DS9 and Voyager episodes. Meh.
There was this new thing called the Internet. You could actually participate instead of passively absorbing whatever messages they thought people wanted or needed to hear. Now I've done enough grinding in MMORPGs to have a full appreciation of how boring and tedious that can get. TV is worse than that, that's how bad TV is.
I don't have much of a movie collection either. Just a handful on DVD and VHS. No BluRays. Whenever I've tried to identify shows worth watching, I come up with so little that I don't bother. Last time I strolled through a Blockbuster, I didn't see a thing on the shelves that I thought worth watching. Don't subscribe to anything like Netflix either.
I also object to the MAFIAA's policies, and do not wish to patronize an industry that treats their customers so shabbily. There are plenty of other, better things to do.
Re:I did... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is actually why I don't have cable. I cut it off about 8 years ago because I was broke and couldn't afford it. Later, when I could afford it, I realized I was glad not to have a firehose of crap emptying into my living room. So I never hooked up again.
Re:I did... (Score:4, Interesting)
Is anyone cutting the content cord, that actually has a decent AV system they've invested in?
That would be me. After yeras of bitching about nothing good on TV, I finally did the raitonal thing. I still get DVDs, but no OTA anything, no cable, no sat, nothing "real time" at all. I don't even miss it a little.
I still watch TV,mind you, at higher quality than most cable (to just by the bitching of /.ers on other stories), but only once its out on DVD as a complete season. The rate at which top-quality new stuff becomed available to me is the same at which it becomes available to you, only the latency has changed. The massive upside is: no filler No turning on the TV in hopes of finding something good, then watching even though I didn't. I haven't seen a commercial at home in 10 years or so.
Only turning on the TV because you have something really good to watch, and otherwise spending your time doing something more productive - well, I highly recommend it.