I’ve been asking everyone to take our annual reader survey. If you haven’t yet, please take a moment to fill it out. I’m going to be sharing various nuggets of information from it. But here’s one that really jumped out at me. We asked two questions on so-called “cord cutters”, in this case people who have ditched cable TV service for streaming services like Netflix, iTunes/AppleTV, Amazon Prime, etc. 83% of our readers say they currently use one of these services – which I don’t find terribly surprising. But this, I did find stunning. 51% of our readers say they either have or are considering canceling their cable services in favor of one or more of those services. Another 16% say they’ve never had cable (I’m going to look at the crosstabs later to see if this ‘never’ group skews young.)
No one likes cable companies. But this makes me wonder whether the entire cable industry is tipping on the brink. (Of course, they’ll be fine since in most cases they also sell you your internet services. But stil.) I know a lot of people are doing research on this. This study suggests that less than a year ago it was still a fringe thing with the public at large. What strikes me is that this phenomenon is usually associated with people in their twenties who are either very digital and don’t see the need for cable or are a bit strapped financially and need to cut a cost. But our readers are fairly evenly spread from their 20s through their 60s and they’re fairly affluent. So they don’t fit that model.
Personally, me and my family seem to be in this ‘considering’ it group that our survey counts as 51% of our audience. We still have cable. But over the last year or so we’ve almost totally stopped using it. We watch some shows on iTunes on an Apple TV box and others we watch on Netflix. Even premium cable shows I’d like to watch we can usually buy on one of these services. For reasons I’m not sure I understand – and ones that may have to do with family dynamics peculiar to us – my wife and I have basically stopped watching all the shows we used to watch on broadcast and cable. I think the only reason we still have cable service is that sometimes I need to watch news or politics programming from home for TPM – when there’s a debate, a major event, etc. But that’s a pretty rare thing. So it’s likely only a matter of time until we cancel the whole thing. In fact, I don’t know why we haven’t canceled already.
