5 ms·

Estimate: 800,000 U.S. Households Abandoned Their TVs For The Web

31 points by jasonlbaptiste 17y ago

allenp 17y ago
Netflix and Hulu fill any TV needs we have - except for the NFL. If Hulu was able to offer all of ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox with no commercials for $30/mo I'd snatch it up in a heartbeat, especially if they also sold some hardware to go from the network straight to the TV.
NEPatriot 17y ago
As people in the TC article pointed out the only issue I have with cord cutting is live sports. MLB has a 20$/month subscription service but I'd like to only pay for my team say 3-4$/month. Once the other leagues follow, and I can pay a few $ a month/team. I'm ready to cut.
- jonknee 17y ago
  And MLB.tv doesn't let you watch local market games which are just about the only ones I'm interested in. You can get around it with a proxy server and alternate billing address, but that's a nasty hack.
  - lotharbot 17y ago
    Similarly with NBA.com's League Pass. Whenever my favorite team plays the nearest team (almost 200 miles away) the game is blacked out for me. Why make it hard for customers to pay you for the product they want? Why make it easier for the non-payers using atdhe.net or justin.tv than it is for subscribers like me to find the games we want? Why make customers pretend they're from Brazil so they don't randomly miss games? Still, these services are a big step forward from what was available 5 years ago.
    - jonknee 17y ago
      > Why make it hard for customers to pay you for the product they want? So they don't lose their lucrative licensing deals on TV. It's a bum out, but that's how it will be for a while.
ugh 17y ago
That’s weird. Are you really paying more than $100 per month for cable in the US? I was confused there because I really couldn’t imagine that of all things the cable bill would be a reason to ditch the TV. You get your standard maybe thirty useful and seventy crappy TV stations in Germany for 15€. Probably because pay TV never really caught on in Germany. Except if you are really into soccer. I don’t even know what I could get by paying beyond soccer. No HBO in Germany. Having public broadcasting doesn’t seem to be too bad, after all :)
- loikujhygthj 17y ago
  $50 for basic cable here, another $50 for extras (discovery channel and comedy network) HD and movies get a lot more expensive. Then sport - ouch. There is only one cable provider and it has a monopoly. I just watched TV on the net after the companies intro $10/month offer ran out.
  - ugh 17y ago
    The monopoly thing is similar, the one big cable provider claims, though, that it is only very small compared to the big ISPs with their newfangled IPTV offers :) That difference to the US is altogether really strange. You can buy additional stuff in Germany now, but there just doesn’t seem to be any original content (like Mythbusters) above and beyond all the soccer stuff. But private TV stations are also a relatively new thing in Germany – the first one got started in the early eighties – and our cable network was privatized only a little more than ten years ago. Will be interesting to see how that all develops.
  - jules 17y ago
    That's all in the standard package here. €16,45/month for 60 channels, including discovery channel, comedy central and sport. The most popular channels come in HD for free, but to get Discovery, National Geographic and History in HD you need to pay extra (€4/month). Maybe we pay the difference with taxes?
- troystribling 17y ago
  I think I was paying about $150 to my cable provider for the ISP cable content combo. I dropped the cable content and upped my ISP service to 20Mb/s and pay $85 per month and now get all my video from the internet. I use Comcast which has a 250Gb monthly bandwidth cap. Currently, I use 150GB to 200GB per month.
blhack 17y ago
I already have, and I suspect that a lot of people my age are going to follow suit. I realized during a recent move that my TV was still at the old house, and that it wasn't really bothering me not having it. I haven't even plugged it in since I finally got it to the new place. I'm either going to trade my television for a road bicycle or a keg-refrigerator. If you're a cable company trying to mount a closed "you will watch what we want you to watch when we want you to watch it!" platform against a "Here are a bunch of things you can watch...whenever you want. Like them? Share the link with your friends!", you're in trouble. The model of "sit down at 7:00pm CST on Thursday evening to watch The Office" is dead and the writing has been on the wall since the 1990s.
terrellm 17y ago
My wife and I dropped a $75/month DirecTV bill over a year ago and haven't looked back. Now, all the DirectTV box does is serve as a stand for our projector to sit on. Hulu has most of the new television shows and if they don't have one of your shows, it's probably on iTunes. I'm not a big sports fan, but I was concerned about the Olympics. Fortunately, NBC had them online. Netflix is great if you watch several movies a month, but if you are like me and one is enough then iTunes or Redbox work great.
- timmaah 17y ago
  Same here. Though I get all the networks plus two PBS via over the air. I'm continually amazed that via analog I couldn't get a single channel that was watchable, but with the switch to digital I can get 6 stations (plus sub channel) perfectly clear.
warfangle 17y ago
I already have. Most of what I want to watch is available on Hulu, Netflix, or CBS' (crappy, admittedly) website. For the one other show I watch, I subscribe on Amazon. I haven't watched over-the-air or over-the-cable TV in almost two years now. Why subsidize the 95% of TV I don't watch with a cable subscription? I'd much rather directly fund the shows I'm truly interested in via Amazon's subscription (or Hulu's ads). The article notes that expected subscription-droppers are to double over the next year. If that stays steady at doubling, in eight years cable and broadcast will be dead. In all likelihood, however, that rate is only going to perform as an S-curve (there will always be holdouts to new technology - just look at the transition from analog to digital airwaves).
- warfangle 17y ago
  I want to update my last sentence. The rate of adoption (not the adoption percentage) is not going to perform as an S-curve. Once the adoption rate peaks, it will quickly drop to zero. In other words: Adoption rate is likely going to increase, either linearly or exponentially (we humans are terrible at seeing exponential rate change at the beginning) until the actual adoption percentage approaches its asymptote. This asymptote represents the technologically and financially marginalized portion of society. Adoption rate will likely be extremely slow on that end. Adoption rate increase will likely look like an S-curve with a very sharp drop-off at the point where the actual percentage of persons adopting TVoIP technology approaches 85-90% of the population - unless an extremely inexpensive TVoIP solution (Google-funded?) is adopted.
pavs 17y ago
So did I. But this seems appropriate: http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesnt-own-a-tel,429/ http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mention...
inmygarage 17y ago
There are over 100 million televisions in the U.S. - so while this is a great indicator (and I'm a huge fan of abandoning TV and am one of the 800K) there's still a while to go before TV becomes a truly irrelevant screen.
nbroyal 17y ago
I desperately want to drop cable, but I'm a huge sports fan which means no viable alternative to ESPN really hurts. Anyone have any suggestions?
- bpick 17y ago
  If you love sports in general you might be out of luck. I love baseball in particular hand have no problem paying the 100 bucks for MLB.tv to watch any (and every) game that I choose, often in high-def, on whatever device I want. I'm not certain about the other sports, but for baseball there is no real reason to be tied to cable.
  - blazamos 17y ago
    Unless your favorite team is local and you are subject to blackout.
    - tvon 17y ago
      True, but you could probably pick them up OTA in that case.
- blazamos 17y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESPN3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESPN3
- maukdaddy 17y ago
  I'm in the same situation. I'd drop cable tomorrow if it weren't for the NFL and ESPN. I'd pay a good amount for online access (in HD!) to both.
Goosey 17y ago
I dropped my cable, but I have a nettop pc hooked up to my TV so that my Hulu/Netflix/Torrent experience maps pretty well. In practice it is like having TV/Movie on demand for a much lower monthly cost with gaming and web browsing built in. If you do your shopping right LCD TVs make great monitors at couch sitting distance.
logic 17y ago
My wife and I are in that 800,000. When we bought our new house a few years ago, it came with an antenna on the roof, so we decided to fore-go cable and try OTA for a while. A few years later, we watch almost nothing on the TV anymore (including OTA), and get a lot of our video entertainment from Netflix, Hulu, the occasional torrent for "niche" material, and local movie theaters if we're feeling particularly rich (or want a night out), or manage to catch a matinée showing. But, in general, we consume considerably less non-interactive media these days. It's done wonders for my honey-do list. ;-)

Netflix and Hulu fill any TV needs we have - except for the NFL. If Hulu was able to offer all of ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox with no commercials for $30/mo I'd snatch it up in a heartbeat, especially if they also sold some hardware to go from the network straight to the TV.

NEPatriot 17y ago

As people in the TC article pointed out the only issue I have with cord cutting is live sports. MLB has a 20$/month subscription service but I'd like to only pay for my team say 3-4$/month. Once the other leagues follow, and I can pay a few $ a month/team. I'm ready to cut.

jonknee 17y ago
And MLB.tv doesn't let you watch local market games which are just about the only ones I'm interested in. You can get around it with a proxy server and alternate billing address, but that's a nasty hack.
- lotharbot 17y ago
  Similarly with NBA.com's League Pass. Whenever my favorite team plays the nearest team (almost 200 miles away) the game is blacked out for me. Why make it hard for customers to pay you for the product they want? Why make it easier for the non-payers using atdhe.net or justin.tv than it is for subscribers like me to find the games we want? Why make customers pretend they're from Brazil so they don't randomly miss games? Still, these services are a big step forward from what was available 5 years ago.
  - jonknee 17y ago
    > Why make it hard for customers to pay you for the product they want? So they don't lose their lucrative licensing deals on TV. It's a bum out, but that's how it will be for a while.

ugh 17y ago

That’s weird. Are you really paying more than $100 per month for cable in the US? I was confused there because I really couldn’t imagine that of all things the cable bill would be a reason to ditch the TV. You get your standard maybe thirty useful and seventy crappy TV stations in Germany for 15€. Probably because pay TV never really caught on in Germany. Except if you are really into soccer. I don’t even know what I could get by paying beyond soccer. No HBO in Germany. Having public broadcasting doesn’t seem to be too bad, after all :)

loikujhygthj 17y ago
$50 for basic cable here, another $50 for extras (discovery channel and comedy network) HD and movies get a lot more expensive. Then sport - ouch. There is only one cable provider and it has a monopoly. I just watched TV on the net after the companies intro $10/month offer ran out.
- ugh 17y ago
  The monopoly thing is similar, the one big cable provider claims, though, that it is only very small compared to the big ISPs with their newfangled IPTV offers :) That difference to the US is altogether really strange. You can buy additional stuff in Germany now, but there just doesn’t seem to be any original content (like Mythbusters) above and beyond all the soccer stuff. But private TV stations are also a relatively new thing in Germany – the first one got started in the early eighties – and our cable network was privatized only a little more than ten years ago. Will be interesting to see how that all develops.
- jules 17y ago
  That's all in the standard package here. €16,45/month for 60 channels, including discovery channel, comedy central and sport. The most popular channels come in HD for free, but to get Discovery, National Geographic and History in HD you need to pay extra (€4/month). Maybe we pay the difference with taxes?
troystribling 17y ago
I think I was paying about $150 to my cable provider for the ISP cable content combo. I dropped the cable content and upped my ISP service to 20Mb/s and pay $85 per month and now get all my video from the internet. I use Comcast which has a 250Gb monthly bandwidth cap. Currently, I use 150GB to 200GB per month.

blhack 17y ago

I already have, and I suspect that a lot of people my age are going to follow suit. I realized during a recent move that my TV was still at the old house, and that it wasn't really bothering me not having it. I haven't even plugged it in since I finally got it to the new place. I'm either going to trade my television for a road bicycle or a keg-refrigerator. If you're a cable company trying to mount a closed "you will watch what we want you to watch when we want you to watch it!" platform against a "Here are a bunch of things you can watch...whenever you want. Like them? Share the link with your friends!", you're in trouble. The model of "sit down at 7:00pm CST on Thursday evening to watch The Office" is dead and the writing has been on the wall since the 1990s.

terrellm 17y ago

My wife and I dropped a $75/month DirecTV bill over a year ago and haven't looked back. Now, all the DirectTV box does is serve as a stand for our projector to sit on. Hulu has most of the new television shows and if they don't have one of your shows, it's probably on iTunes. I'm not a big sports fan, but I was concerned about the Olympics. Fortunately, NBC had them online. Netflix is great if you watch several movies a month, but if you are like me and one is enough then iTunes or Redbox work great.

timmaah 17y ago
Same here. Though I get all the networks plus two PBS via over the air. I'm continually amazed that via analog I couldn't get a single channel that was watchable, but with the switch to digital I can get 6 stations (plus sub channel) perfectly clear.

warfangle 17y ago

I already have. Most of what I want to watch is available on Hulu, Netflix, or CBS' (crappy, admittedly) website. For the one other show I watch, I subscribe on Amazon. I haven't watched over-the-air or over-the-cable TV in almost two years now. Why subsidize the 95% of TV I don't watch with a cable subscription? I'd much rather directly fund the shows I'm truly interested in via Amazon's subscription (or Hulu's ads). The article notes that expected subscription-droppers are to double over the next year. If that stays steady at doubling, in eight years cable and broadcast will be dead. In all likelihood, however, that rate is only going to perform as an S-curve (there will always be holdouts to new technology - just look at the transition from analog to digital airwaves).

warfangle 17y ago
I want to update my last sentence. The rate of adoption (not the adoption percentage) is not going to perform as an S-curve. Once the adoption rate peaks, it will quickly drop to zero. In other words: Adoption rate is likely going to increase, either linearly or exponentially (we humans are terrible at seeing exponential rate change at the beginning) until the actual adoption percentage approaches its asymptote. This asymptote represents the technologically and financially marginalized portion of society. Adoption rate will likely be extremely slow on that end. Adoption rate increase will likely look like an S-curve with a very sharp drop-off at the point where the actual percentage of persons adopting TVoIP technology approaches 85-90% of the population - unless an extremely inexpensive TVoIP solution (Google-funded?) is adopted.

pavs 17y ago

So did I. But this seems appropriate: http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesnt-own-a-tel,429/ http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mention...

inmygarage 17y ago

There are over 100 million televisions in the U.S. - so while this is a great indicator (and I'm a huge fan of abandoning TV and am one of the 800K) there's still a while to go before TV becomes a truly irrelevant screen.

nbroyal 17y ago

I desperately want to drop cable, but I'm a huge sports fan which means no viable alternative to ESPN really hurts. Anyone have any suggestions?

bpick 17y ago
If you love sports in general you might be out of luck. I love baseball in particular hand have no problem paying the 100 bucks for MLB.tv to watch any (and every) game that I choose, often in high-def, on whatever device I want. I'm not certain about the other sports, but for baseball there is no real reason to be tied to cable.
- blazamos 17y ago
  Unless your favorite team is local and you are subject to blackout.
  - tvon 17y ago
    True, but you could probably pick them up OTA in that case.
blazamos 17y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESPN3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESPN3
maukdaddy 17y ago
I'm in the same situation. I'd drop cable tomorrow if it weren't for the NFL and ESPN. I'd pay a good amount for online access (in HD!) to both.

Goosey 17y ago

I dropped my cable, but I have a nettop pc hooked up to my TV so that my Hulu/Netflix/Torrent experience maps pretty well. In practice it is like having TV/Movie on demand for a much lower monthly cost with gaming and web browsing built in. If you do your shopping right LCD TVs make great monitors at couch sitting distance.

logic 17y ago

My wife and I are in that 800,000. When we bought our new house a few years ago, it came with an antenna on the roof, so we decided to fore-go cable and try OTA for a while. A few years later, we watch almost nothing on the TV anymore (including OTA), and get a lot of our video entertainment from Netflix, Hulu, the occasional torrent for "niche" material, and local movie theaters if we're feeling particularly rich (or want a night out), or manage to catch a matinée showing. But, in general, we consume considerably less non-interactive media these days. It's done wonders for my honey-do list. ;-)