2023: The Year ‘Cord Cutting’ Became The Majority Norm
from the that-thing-you-said-wasn't-happening-definitely-happened dept
It wasn’t that long ago that cable TV execs were trying to claim that “cord cutting” was either outright fiction, or a fad that would end once Millennials started procreating. The willful denial among cable execs was downright palpable for the better part of the last decade. Now they all just pretend like they never made those claims or predictions.
Fast forward to 2023, and streaming subscriptions are poised to pass traditional cable TV subscriptions for the first time ever. According to new analysis by research firm Insider Intelligence, by the end of this year, the number of cable TV subscribers will drop 10.2% to 121.1 million, while non-pay TV customers (streaming, antenna) will soar 12.5%, to 144.1 million.
By 2027, the firm estimates that 182.4 million Americans will be streaming TV customers while “just” 91.3 million Americans will subscribe to cable TV:
“Regardless of how one defines pay TV, there is an unmistakable attrition in the number of people who are willing to pay upwards of $100 a month for a live TV bundle,” Paul Verna, vice president of content at II, said. “The cord cutters have won.”
Organizations like Nielsen indicate that the Rubicon already technically crossed back in June, when the firm reported that 38% of all television viewing was now being done via streaming, compared with 31% for traditional cable. In 2023, broadcast TV viewing accounted for 20.8% of total TV watching, a new low point.
It’s all fairly impressive for a trend that executives spent the better part of a decade trying to pretend wasn’t happening. Even sports leagues, the last major reason to retain a traditional cable connection, have slowly been beefing up their direct-to-consumer live streaming options (see: NFL+).
Now that’s not to say there isn’t trouble in paradise. We’ve seen ample indication that streaming executives have learned absolutely nothing from history, and, as they try to deliver improved quarterly returns to Wall Street, are engaging in many of the same behaviors (nickel-and-diming users, relentless price hikes, an unyielding thirst for consolidation) that gave us Comcast in the first place.
Filed Under: competition, cord cutting, market trends, pay tv, streaming, tv, video
Comments on “2023: The Year ‘Cord Cutting’ Became The Majority Norm”
Also, cable TV channels are becoming zombies full of reruns and little in the way of new programs.
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With AI Chatbot, everything will be a re-run.
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Seeing USA Network mentioned right off the bad makes me sad. It used to have some good shows. Now it basically runs SVU 24/7 (except on Mondays, when it airs WWE Raw).
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Next year, it will run Smackdown on Fridays as well. I think WWE got $2 billion from Fox to run it over the air, but that five-year deal ends in 2024 and the Smackdown brand lost nearly half its value. NBCU got it for something like $1.2 billion, and Smackdown is going to lose a lot of viewers. It’s getting about 2.25 million viewers over the air on Fridays, which is pretty good for what’s otherwise a death slot for non-sports programs.
On the other hand, for WWE it does mean all three of its programs are within the Peacock ecosystem, as are what used to be called pay-per-views.
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Except the CW won NXT rights for the next contract. RAW’s new contract has yet to be awarded, and much that I’ve read does NOT expect an NBCU win. Where it goes remains to be seen
lol imagine having a nuclear family unit in 2023. Fuck that shit. It’s not a phase mom, no FUCK YOU, dad!
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It doesn’t take much imagination. In the USA, that describes about 70% of households with children.
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Don’t worry. We’re working on that.
Since straight men destroyed Roe v. Wade, TV isn’t the only cords us women are cutting.
It’s going to keep going. My only sibling, my parents, and my in-laws, and aunt & uncle have all told me they hate their cable bill and want to dump it.
Did they, or are the cable subscribers dying? It’s hard for me to imagine many people under the age of, say, 30, being cord-cutters. They’re not canceling cable TV services, just as they’re not canceling landline telephone services and home news delivery. In other words, while cable TV subscribers may be a minority now, I’m not sure “cord-cutters” form a majority.
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I would say you have that backwards: probably most people under the age of 30 are cord-cutters because streaming is the norm to them.
Same goes for landline service and home news delivery. This group has grown up with smartphones and online news. They have no use for the old stuff.
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I think the AC has a problem with the terminology. “Cutting” the cord implies that there was a cord in the household to cut. Under-30s are more a cord-never generation than a cord-cutter one.
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Yes, though it’s a bit more figurative than that. Even if a home has a “cord”, and even if the residents are still using it for DOCSIS, a person is considered to have “cut” it if they canceled their own cable TV service on it—presumably for reasons other than moving or transferring into someone else’s name, and of course death doesn’t count.
The term “cord-never” is okay, though could be a bit misleading. I grew up with cable TV, had access in a university dorm, and technically even paid a few partial bills (under protest) while subletting; but I never willingly subscribed, so am I a “cord-cutter”, “cord-never”, or something else? Anyway, if we do accept these terms, the combination of “cord-nevers” (which include older people who always used antennas or didn’t watch TV channels at all), and “cord-cutters” appear to be a plurality, with probably neither group being a majority. Depending on how “enshittification”/cancelation rates compare to birth and death rates, “cord-nevers” might take the majority position first.
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It’s irrelevant, because this isn’t about you (or any other individual). Individual anecdotes don’t matter when there’s real data showing the decline of cable subscriptions and the continued rise of streaming.
There’s no argument to be made, unless maybe if you’re a Comcast/Cox exec trying to justify your salary.
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Of course not; the reference to an individual (me) was intended to represent a class of people. If we’re going to be classifying people as “cord-cutters” or whatever for statistical purposes, we should have some idea what these terms mean; otherwise, we’re talking past each other while pulling numbers out of our asses.
The other option, which I’m in favor of, is to just divide the world into cable TV subscribers (including people living with the nominal subscribers and sharing their subscriptions) and non-subscribers. It’s much easier to define and explain, and doesn’t seem any less useful to me.
Not surprising given that most streaming services outside Netflix and Amazon are just the same old traditional pay-TV companies with a fresh coat of paint.
Paramount, Disney, Max [or whatever it’s called this week], Discovery, etc. Steaming isn’t exactly a new business as much is it’s just a pivot from getting retransmission fees from cable companies to going direct to consumer. They certainly had to build up the infrastructure to do it, but at the end of the day, all they did was cut out the middle man. The momentum is strong to keep doing what they’ve done for 50+ years.
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And there’s YouTube, Tiktok, etc.
The uh-oh doom loop for cable companies is also coming when they are going to have to replace property, plant and equipment for a shrinking customer base.
Cable companies are asset-burdened. They have a lot of PPE that can’t easily be liquidated for cash, aside from their offices and work trucks. There’s not much you can do with miles of cable, satellite dishes, etc. And they have to be maintained and replaced, or reliability goes down and customers continue to cancel, etc.
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What about providing internet service?
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Cable companies already do that, and it’s one line of their business in addition to selling phone service, TV channels and regional advertising.
If a cable provider were to put itself up for sale or be forced to liquidate, the internet aspect of the business would likely go either to the incumbent landline phone company (AT&T, Frontier, etc.) or utility company.
The TV and ad business would be stripped of assets. Cable channels can be distributed via streaming and sell direct to consumers, and local TV and radio stations can hire away the account executives or just by the database of client leads.
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But what’s DOCSIS done for us lately? It seems to be near its limits, as DSL was 20 years ago: the last downstream speed boost was DOCSIS 3.1 in 2013.
You’re right that co-ax is not obsolete; but it’s obsolescent, and since Bobson’s talking about liquidating for cash, companies will be lucky to eventually get enough money to cover removal costs. It’s unlikely there will ever be a large-scale co-ax deployment again, which means the buyers are basically scrap metal dealers—who might find it’s not worth the work of removing the plastic—and niches like ham radio operators, who could never make a dent in the mountain of cable deployed in a large city (it wouldn’t be worth the effort of trying to sell).
I don’t see the situation as “doom”, though. They can probably skate by for a decade or two selling 10 Gbit/s internet service, and then they’ve got rights-of-way that their would-be competitors don’t. We’re 30 years into hybrid fiber/co-ax, and it just keeps leaning more and more toward fiber. What’s the TV aspect actually costing them, apart from some weird regulatory requirements?
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DOCSIS is now rolling out 4.0 with symmetrical speeds up to 6 gigabits or so, and asymmetrical up to 10. This speed will be good for decades.
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3.1 had that, 10 years ago. It’s not a bad speed if they can actually deliver it, even when neighbors are downloading heavily, but I suspect that will eventually require uneconomical amounts of node-splitting. You can’t have 2000 subscribers on a node if they’re all expecting 10 Gbit/s, and the prospect of deploying more end-of-life technology (more nodes) won’t be appealing to operators.
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Well, that assumes nobody wants to run a home based public server. Limiting connection speeds to user only levels is one reason that so much of the Internet has become centralized, and will remain so for a long time.
cordless cord cutting
with the death of cable. the new steaming shitification is consolidating and turning into cable without the cord! so what do we call it when we have cut that streaming cable cord too?
service hopping isn’t the answer ether! while some may accept that as the norm. even that gets old fast! and if the show/ movie is a must have right now! no one want’s to pay for an overpriced service just for one show! so what will be the next solution? because copyright cartel greed will never go away!
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I think the people in charge have been calling it “piracy”. Ahoy, matey!
(Let’s not talk about people who don’t watch TV. Regarding them and TV executives, it’s as Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”)
yo ho ho mother fucker!
cutting the cord was easy! even when streaming was a new fad! now streaming is turning into cable with all that shitification crap! consolidate here! snatch a little one there. rap it all up into one package and what do you get? a cordless version of cable 2.0!
with availability of free stuff online. i be sail’n the high sea’s collect’n me booty! yo ho mother fucker!
Anybody under the age of 45 in a position of leadership anywhere can tell you that that’s pretty much the norm for the previous generation. The amount of things across the board that need unfucked, from decades of people prepetually doing things the same way and pretending reality wasn’t making them increasingly untenable, is just staggering.