Record numbers of Americans are unplugging their subscriptions
Full Story: FT
Only a few years ago Nielsen pooh-poohed cord cutting, suggesting it was a temporary trend caused by young people’s economic circumstances. Here’s a post from 2011:
While Nielsen data demonstrates that consumers are viewing more video content across all platforms — rather than replacing one medium with another — a small subset of younger, urban consumers seem to be going without paid TV subscriptions for the time being. The long-term effects of this are still unclear, as it is undetermined if this is also an economic issue that will see these individuals entering the TV marketplace once they have the means, or the beginning of a larger shift to online viewing.
The long-term effects are now clear, despite the fact that Nielsen tried very, very hard to wish away the obvious. As I wrote in 2011,
I think Nielsen is misreading the tea leaves here. But they have every incentive to hope that this is an anomaly, that hipsters will switch to conventional TV viewing in a few years, instead of what will happen: they will invent a new way to experience ‘TV’, whatever that comes to mean.
Only a few months ago, some Nielsen execs said the same things they had in 2011, and even suggested that customers are more likely to drop Netflix and other video services than cable:
In a press briefing held Thursday, executives from Nielsen suggested cable subscribers who also have a subscription-video-on-demand service are more likely to drop the SVOD than they are cable. In fact, according to Nielsen data, 93% of homes who had both services were more likely to keep the cable and instead drop broadband or SVOD offerings, said Glenn Enoch, senior vice president of audience insights for the measurement and data service.
“Cable may have a little more staying power than it’s actually being given credit for recently,” said Enoch.
He suggested that a younger U.S. population is increasingly mobile and prone to add and drop cable service as it moves to new locations. Nielsen has noticed a “seasonal” shift in cable-subscriber churn, with more of it taking place in the fourth and first quarters of the year, but less of it in the second and third quarters.
Recent cable-company results might not provide complete support for that theory. Comcast disclosed in its fourth-quarter earnings results, for example, that it added fewer video customers in that fiscal period - just 6,000 - compared with 46,000 in the year-earlier period. Consumers with cable may not be dropping it, but those that don’t have it yet may not be adding it.
Nielsen is an example of a company that refuses to see the obvious.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/126985775862
