Snip Snip…

Raise your hand if you love when Time Warner Cable or sorry, “Spectrum” or any other cable provider gives you a ring and tries to offer you a service that you’re not interested in. You’re almost surprised that they are asking you if you’d like to pay for their cable offerings. You thought they’d read the news. Perhaps maybe looked at your customer profile before calling you. You’ve never had cable in your life or you recently kicked the habit. Astounded, you tell the customer service representative you’re not interested. *Click*.

Welcome to the Cord Cutters. It’s a special organization, one where you’re representative of cable companies and broadcast channels’ absolute worst fear, CHANGE. It’s been a thing for years, but recently we’ve seen this epidemic, or perhaps enlightenment (depending on how you look at it), accelerate to epic proportions with now up to 22.2 Million people having “cut the cord.”

By 2021, 81M people in the US will have either cut the cord or will have never lived a life of robust cable packages and 84,000 unnecessary channels. That’s 30% of adults in the US and growing. It’s kind of a joke at this point. Remember dial-up internet? It sounded like this. Having a cable subscription is kinda of like dial-up internet. It’s annoying and dead. “Last year, even the Olympics and [the U.S.] presidential election could not prevent younger audiences from abandoning pay TV.” says a senior analyst at eMarketing.

Simply put, cable companies are in trouble, but they already know. Customers are opting for their internet packages instead. People are still watching TV, but their wallets and eyeballs are turned elsewhere. The smart cable companies understand you’ll pay for internet, but the ecosystem is beside itself as Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Facebook and other OTT platforms ramp up their content offerings. Tech companies are bidding for live streaming sports rights, cable channels are dying and global warming is happening. No one knows what to do. Except the telcos. They have endless amounts of money so they will net out ok. Most major telcos are already buying content companies.

You do have some smart broadcasters like CBS, forcing customers to subscribe to new platforms like CBS All Access. Star Trek, one of the biggest cultural TV shows and properties in the galaxy, recently premiered its new iteration “Discovery” exclusively on CBS All Access with “record signups”. You can only watch the first episode for free, then you have to pay $6 a month. That’s a big deal.  You can’t even watch the show on cable. It’s the dawn of the “Skinny Bundle”. This is basically cable on the internet. Several companies like Sling TV are touting new skinny bundles. Companies like ESPN are expected to make a play here and many more will quickly follow as well.

If you haven’t cut the cord yet, try it, everyone’s doing it, but don’t worry, they’ll still find a way to get your money. They don’t want you to leave, they don’t want you to win. They just want you to subscribe to their service. BTW, have you seen Rick & Morty?

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