The Cord Cutter's Guide to CES
For cord-cutters, the television makers at the Consumer Electronics Show gave us a lot of complex sorta-solutions to what is (on paper) and easy-to-solve problem.
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For years cable and satellite companies have maintained they're not afraid of people canceling their service and watching video over the Internet (i.e. cutting the cord), but the cord nevers — the young people who never sign up for pay-TV service in the first place — are a totally different story.
For cord-cutters, the television makers at the Consumer Electronics Show gave us a lot of complex sorta-solutions to what is (on paper) and easy-to-solve problem.
Today, Rebecca Greenfield wrote about young, traditional media-shunning cord-cutters. In the comments section, we heard from a 60-year-old who cut her cable subscription—but is keeping her newspaper subscription.
While many predicted that the future (and the demise) of the television industry would come in the form of dropped cable subscriptions, aka, cord cutting, it's not turning out that way. Rather, it looks like we will have two camps of TV-watching humans: Cord clingers and cord nevers, neither of whom are enthusiastic about the state of things.
Cable companies are concerned about flat growth and a rising number of potential customers interested in other things. So what's a cable company to do? Enlist Apple to get people to subscribe again, of course.
Recent cord cutting numbers of about 400,000 last quarter might not prove a threatening trend, but that's not the number that matters.
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