We might want to overlook or some of us may not have noticed but cable services are undergoing a rough patch or bad phase with the noticeable rise of cord-cutting in 2020. And it has also been predicted by Roku that 50% of the American Household will have cut the cords by 2024. Only during the third quarter of this year, and COVID-19 at its full swing in 2020, Netflix earned about 73.08 million subscribers in the U.S. only. On the other side, Xfinity and Spectrum cable have marked their footprint on more than 80% of the US and have introduced their streaming apps exclusively for their subscribers but the statistics state a different story in 2020 – where cord-cutting has 20% by July 2020 only.
This confirms a long list of cord-cutter and we can see never-cord gen watching everything online already. So the question here is, what and how did cable television get killed? Have you ever wanted to kill your cable provider? If you happen to be or were a cable subscriber, were you happy with the services you were getting? The bills, customer support, technical issues, and so much more that come in a package – was that not enough for people switching to cable TV alternatives. Let’s dive into this discussion further to comprehend and analyze the factors!
Killing does not always have to be hanging the provider, people have no time for that. They are firing cable TV services which signify that they are tired of paying expensive bills for the packages that are not suitable for them. Furthermore, some cable providers are infamous for their bad customer services and putting additional charges on the bill by mistake or for the features, the owner was not told is premium services.
Among the best cord-cutting streaming services, some are:
- HULU
- Netflix
- SlingTV
- Playstation Vue
- FuboTV for sports lovers
- YouTube TV that costs $50 a month for amazing channels
- WatchTV
- Philo
“Cord-cutting” has become a real threat to the cable industry even when there was a time when it was just considered a myth. The number of pay-tv households was 105 million in 2010, and it has drastically gone down from this huge number to around 82.9 million! Moreover, eMarketer conducted a study last year which forecasted that this number will likely decrease to 72.7 Million by 2023. Now, the cable is suffering from a huge setback and struggling to stand again.
What could be the possible reasons?
- Having no competition for cable TV companies for years is the truth- they kind of had a monopoly based on their footmark and the content they offered. Due to almost no competition, the cable companies easily agreed over higher contract prices with the content owners because they knew the customers would pay for it whatsoever.
- Today, the competition has amplified with cheap and easy-to-use online streaming services like YouTube TV, AT&T TV NOW, HULU, and much more, the cable companies are stuck under the burden of expensive contracts which is why they are struggling to compete with smaller services like HBO or HULU Live TV are offering. Not only are the Cable TV companies stuck with their previous deals.
- Contrary to it, even bigger names in the online streaming industry like Disney announced that they would like to offer smaller live television packages. For that, Disney stated that they may need to make new deals with the content owners. This proves that even streaming companies are perhaps stuck with their old contracts.
- Cable TV didn’t fail because of greed. The real issue here was the lack of competition which led to less progression and transformations. As there was no competition, the need for putting better contracts and deals was never there. This resulted in customers paying more than they needed.
- Content owners don’t feel the need to change or lower the prices even though the cable and streaming companies are still stuck with costly contracts. There is no reason for the content owners to lower the price until they feel the need to change depending upon the circumstances.
The bottom line is:
Now the only thing we can do is to wait and see what’s going to happen but it is clear that Americans are done with overpaying for cable TV services. The trend and predictions do confirm that cable will face further challenges from the existing market in the coming years – as it was not ready for it.
