As the third quarter reporting season is now winding down, there are some startling trends which starting to emerge from the cable industry. Probably the most striking is that cable customers are now letting go of their traditional cable service, and instead, are now opting to use other types of high speed connectivity to deliver content. As a result, the demand for on demand, Internet based video is starting to pick up.
Based from the latest ‘FierceCable’ report, pay per view television lost almost 180,000 subscribers. This is more than twice the loss which was reported (83,000) for Q3, a year ago, in 2013. As a result of these staggering numbers, the CEO of Cablevision (NYSE: CVC), James Dolan declared that his cable company is looking to add more streams of revenue. These will be based upon primarily new Internet and Broadband related directives. One example of this is offering public WiFi to its large customer base.
Cablevision alone lost more than 56,000 subscribers in Q3 of this year. This trend of declining numbers in the cable industry has led the Wall Street Journal to coin the new term ‘cord cutting’ for the cable industry. Research analyst Craig Moffett noted that there was only a 0.1% decline in the customer base for cable services. But he noted, it was a rather disturbing finding to see that the total number of subscribers for both telecom and satellite sectors had declined rather sharply.
CEO James Dolan best summed it up stating the obvious: “Ultimately cord-cutting and going to over the top is something we do believe is going to happen and we are preparing ourselves for it.” (SOURCE: http://www.fiercecable.com/story/cord-cutting-accelerates-pay-tv-sub-losses-double-179k/2014-11-07).
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