… yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:
Meantime, over the past two quarters, the number of U.S. households that subscribe to cable and other paid TV services fell for the first time since the dawn of cable – by about 335,000 households out of about 100 million, according to data provider SNL Kagan.
Time Warner Inc. said last month it expects its HBO pay-TV service to lose 1.5 million subscribers this year, though it blamed the decline on the poor economy and changes in promotions, not on consumers replacing cable subscriptions with Web video, a practice dubbed “cord-cutting.”
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Time Warner,
Just raise the prices on the remainder till you’re still getting the same revenue stream.
I would attribute it to the fact that there is little worth watching on TV anymore – the economy was just a catalyst. If i didn’t watch sports, i would have dropped a long time ago.
It seems slightly less interesting than the version of the same story which appeared here in the NY TImes, which at least managed to mention broadcast TV as well as web video.
On the other hand, one couldn’t really expect one of Rupert Murdoch’s organs to mention that the old enemy wasn’t dead yet….
Good, pay-TV is a massive rip off that survives on anti competitive bundling practices. What one gets for their 60 dollars a month are hundreds of channels that one never watches that individually provide very little original content, which in turn have very cheap production values. If one actually wants high production values be prepared to pay again for premium channels like HBO.
Someone needs to do for pay TV what iTunes did for music. Consumers need to be empowered to pay for only the content that they watch and leave the hundreds of useless, content recycling channels in the ash bin. I recently decided to forgo pay TV when my apartment unit dropped it as a perk and while I was tempted for a bit I realized that most of the time I just used the TV for background noise while I worked on the computer or other projects. The majority of cable TV only has about enough interesting content to grab my full attention about 15-20 minutes out of the hour. When I did the math to determine the actual number of shows I was really interested in and the actual number of new episodes they produced the cost per show was simply not worth it.
Pay TV is becoming a house of cards like music and publishing before it. It’s built on consumers being locked in by restrictive technologies and bundling practices. People don’t realize that the largest cost in Pay TV is their own time. As new media sources on the internet provided lower cost and more interesting content look for the bloated old media empires to crumble.
I am not sure it means anything except the contraction of households due to the economy. One cable subscription per household, but more viewers.
If Dexter weren’t on, I’d consider cutting the cord.
It’s like deja vu all over again.
Didn’t I read the same paragraph in the Times this week?
I didn’t want to rent a telephone from my communications provider in the 50′s, and I don’t want to rent video content from my communications provider now.
I agree with Mike B regarding bundling. If I called up to subscribe to Time magazine — and was told the only way to do that was to also subscribe to Sports Illustrated, Field & Stream, and Architectural Digest — I would be furious. Well, I’m furious that I have to pay for so many useless channels just to get the ones I want.
Cable a la carte needs to get here soon.