Streaming TV Viewing Passed Cable Last Month in Industry First (bloomberg.com) 32
The amount of time US audiences spent watching online TV surpassed cable for the first time ever. From a report: Subscribers to services like Netflix and Hulu accounted for 34.8% of all TV consumption in July, the research firm Nielsen said Thursday. That edged out cable TV at 34.4%. Broadcast was a distant 21.6%. Audiences watched an average of 190.9 billion minutes per week of streamed content in July, Nielsen said. That passed the tally for April 2020, when people were stuck at home because of the pandemic. While consumers spent almost 23% more time streaming, cable and broadcast viewing slumped.
Really? (Score:3)
I would have thought that this happened years ago.
Re: (Score:3)
I feel like the decline of cable maps pretty exactly on the age of the population. A lot of people like my parents have both cable still and Netflix but my parents really just keep the cable for local stuff and news and they have pared back a lot of the extras on it.
Older people will stick with the familiar cable box and remote while younger people will have no idea what those things are or why they would use them over a streaming service. We are just hitting the inflection point now. Traditional cabl
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
... my parents got a streaming box, but it can stream local channels, so they got rid of the set top box. Are they cable or streaming?
Great question. I typically watch Netflix, Amazon, Disney+. Clearly that's streaming. But I also watch sports using something like Fubo. I watch that with a Roku device. I can watch games live or I can watch them delayed. The games are produced by a local affiliate sports network. Kind of blurry, isn't it? Watching live games probably ought to count as CATV and tape delay ought to be streaming.
My guess is what it really comes down to is the producer part. If it's produced by a traditional station or networ
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah from a tech standpoint these things are definitely overlapping now, especially I think the cable/ISP companies are realizing that today they are better off using all the frequency over a coax cable for IP traffic and deliver the video service that way rather than seperating a large chunk for just the cable TV service.
I think the distiguishing feature is the payment, I would look at a large package of a bundle of "channels" from many different media houses especailly sold from the wire provider as "cabl
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
my parents really just keep the cable for local stuff and news
That's so weird. The boomers forgot antennas?
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty much, at least in my household my parents ditched the antenna as soon as cable came along. Back in "the day" all the local channels came in free via the cable line anyway so it made a lot more sense to just plug the coax into the TV and get your local broadcast channels without all the futzing of signal issues with antennas. You only needed the box to get the cable only channels.
Now with digital broadcast TV requiring a whole seperate antenna as TV sets don't come out of the box with them it takes
Re: (Score:2)
Now with digital broadcast TV requiring a whole seperate antenna as TV sets don't come out of the box with them
In what country?
Here in the US, digital broadcast requires only a standard VHF/UHF antenna - the same ones in use the last several decades. You might need an ATSC tuner if you still don't have one, but that's it. I'm not sure it makes sense to have an antenna in the box since a lot of people don't live close enough to get by with an indoor antenna.
Re: (Score:2)
Thats exactly what I mean, most TV sets (bet even today less and less) will have an analog tuner but but when my parents switched over it was the CRT era where sets had the actual rabbit ears or we used to have a roof mounted antenna.
Now you may be able to go into a store and buy an LCD with a coax tuner jack on it but to get it up and running for broadcast you need to buy and place some type of antenna to receive that signal. It's just an extra step that many people are not going to even think to take ve
Re: (Score:2)
Because of local topography, we pretty much can't pick up anything OTA. We have bottom-level broadcast basic only because we pay a tiny amount over what internet-only would cost, otherwise we'd use Sling or something.
Re: (Score:2)
I think it's more accurate to say that Gen X'ers forgot antennas, since many of them would have had broadcast as young children but switched to cable during it's rise and prime as they got a bit older.
The poster's point is completely spot on though IMO. A couple of short years ago before cancer took my father he was in his mid-60s and knew that Netflix was a thing but had no idea how to use it or why he would want to. He watched cable TV every night. It was kind of infuriating to me when I would visit lol .
Re: (Score:2)
Cable TV was once a symbol of middle class prosperity. If you didnt have cable in the late 20th century you were either poor or quite non traditional (I did encounter a small handful of middle class people without cable during this period but they were definitely few and far between). Many boomers likely associate TV antennas with backwardness and poverty.
I still remember when I got rid of my own cable a bit before the term "cord cutter" became popular and legitimized the practice. My boomer parents didnt o
Re: (Score:2)
Not everyone can get OTA. My colony can't very well due to giant hills/small mountains, trees, etc. :(
Re: (Score:2)
My gf dad watches golf. Cable is super grainy. So I got him an antenna and wow 1080 golf. Much clearer OTA. Of course HD was not the default back then.
Not sure if the digital upgrade threw them for a loop, but yes lots of boomers have no idea antenna TV still works.
(I'm not extrapolating from a single anecdote, but I just don't have stories for the other boomers).
Re: (Score:2)
IMO this probably happened earlier, and Nielsen's data collection is only just how catching up because they naturally bias towards cable subscribers.
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunately streaming is now getting infected with more and more things that were infesting cable, and which caused people to go to streaming in the first place...
Re: (Score:2)
As a percentage of households, maybe. I have streaming but no cable. But I watch way fewer hours of TV per week than anyone I know that has cable.
CATV has been a zombie for decade+ now (Score:3)
CATV and "broadcast" or "linear" TV has been a zombie for a decade+. Only now in the past couple of years has the body metastasized to the point that it's falling apart. Finally.
I pulled the plug on Pop Culture around 20 years ago. It was the reality shows, you see. Instead of Discovery showing you new things, and History showing you old things, both -- and more -- started showing you inane reality shows. Pawn stars? Orange County Choppers? And all the other insane vacuous dreck?
Thats when I pulled the plug, metaphorically. I reckon it was early 00's. I retained CATV until around 2018, when all that I used it for was Amazing World of Gumball, F1 racing, and the big car auctions. Oh, and How It's Made. No news. No sports. No soaps, no procedurals, I had given up on Law and Order and derivatives well before 2000.
Why am I feeding the world's 2nd largest disinformatzia machine in the world? To watch a well past it's sell-date? To watch the worlds pinnacle of car racing fall into wokeism? MGU-K? No pit babes? Fly-by's gone? World champion acting the SJW King? NO! There was nothing to keep TV for. Nothing at all. The good things that did come out (Turn - Washingtons Spies) escaped my notice because by the 2015's I'd given up on TV and all pop culture including Top 40 radio.
So I did the thing, and had Comcast drop my TV. I have no choice but to retain them for internet. It's the only thing on the edge of the swamp I live at.
Even tho the streamers have Balkanized, I pick and choose. Netflix, Prime (only 'cause i'm prime amazon) and the big 3 anime. Hulu and Disney+ got shunned for political grandstanding, and Paramount+ doesn't intrest me. No worthwhile new movies, so if there's some I'll catch 'em when they filter to Netflix for a month and then vanish. That's how it is now.
Good riddance, TV. I felt a pang of nostalgia the day NTSC died, but I feel nothing for the death of broadcast. ABC, CBS, NBC, Faux, an whatever rubbish is left has to fade into the history books. They did their duty -- they helped destroy the country and brought us to the point we are today.
Goebbels would be so proud. And TV's baby is even worse -- Social Media. Ugh.
To this very day I still don't understand what the Kardashians and all things like that are all about, or why these people even matter, and why so many emulate them. It just... does not compute.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
CATV has long been for old people who don't want to figure out something new, and for people who want to watch a whole lot of sports. Most sports are losing popularity in the USA, and those which are gaining are achieving only small gains, and of course the former group is literally dying off. They will try anything but unbundling, which I realize isn't really viable. My only concern is whether losing that revenue is going to raise cable internet prices even in those markets where competition exists. In mo
Re: (Score:3)
CATV and "broadcast" or "linear" TV has been a zombie for a decade+. Only now in the past couple of years has the body metastasized to the point that it's falling apart. Finally.
With rollout of ATSC and Cable prices reaching for the stars OTA picked up millions of viewers in recent years. There are more OTA channels at least around here than ever.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01... [techcrunch.com]
Nice thing about it no DRM, no being forced to sit thru commercials like some modern streaming systems, no data collection and it costs nothing beyond an antenna and receiver. The DVR/VHS recorder is now just a piece of software running on a spare computer or $40 SBC.
Re: (Score:1)
I pulled the plug on Pop Culture around 20 years ago.
Same. I did it in 1992. It's clear mass media is nothing but a giant propaganda machine. It's also a huge waste of time. I have better wastes of time.
To watch the worlds pinnacle of car racing fall into wokeism?
Oh, ho! Speak against the woke and expect some nasty indirect attacks toward your character since the wokesters prefer censorship and shout-downs to any fair debate. Hard to argue though. Woke ruins anything it touches.
I felt a pang of nostalgia the day NTSC died
Me too. Lots of cool tech that I love was tied to the vertical refresh. I'm thinking Atari ST and Amiga video
Re: (Score:2)
I pulled the plug on Pop Culture around 20 years ago. It was the reality shows, you see. Instead of Discovery showing you new things, and History showing you old things, both -- and more -- started showing you inane reality shows. Pawn stars? Orange County Choppers? And all the other insane vacuous dreck?
Hahaha, that is exactly my own story in regards to cable both in terms of timing and the issues I had with it. Wasnt TV in the early 2000's just the frick'n worst? I wouldnt know about where it is today but I have no interest in going back.
I remember when cable surpassed broadcast (Score:2)
Late 80's early 90's we hit 50% of US households had cable TV. Eventually cable companies started treating everyone like crap and slide into decline against new digital satellite services. That lasted only briefly, once internet and phone started becoming the normal bundle for cable the satellite services really started to hurt. For the most part cable companies pivoted to being ISPs. And they're still treating customers like crap.
Not entirely shocking (Score:2)
Does Broadcast really mean over the air? (Score:1)
I get much of my TV for free by watching OTA Broadcasting. Iâ(TM)d be interested if the numbers for broadcast are OTA or just from NBC/ABC/CBS/FOX and PBS.
It's lingering because Cable Internet bundles TV (Score:3)