From Techdirt comes yet another bulletin about the phenomenon of cord cutters—this rising demographic is, well, continuing to rise. From the article:
The pool of potential customers has risen with no correlative rise in subscribers. That’s an indication that more households are foregoing cable television entirely…that had better represent a huge concern for the industry. Television providers have done a horrible job of making their content available in the way customers want it, when the customers want it, and they result has been a declining subscriber base.
Personally, I humbly submit that the availability of content is only part of the problem. I think the quality of the content is an issue too. The Beloved and I have a dear family member who lives in another city, and we visit him several times a year. When we do, we stay at hotels which happen to have cable, and we are inevitably horrified by what we find when we go browsing.
The last four visits, the stations on offer seemed to be running marathons of a different hideous reality television series. There was the Dance Moms weekend. There was another where aspiring tattoo artists competed in themed contests (doing real tattoos on live people!) and were eliminated, one by one, to crown a tattoo king or queen. Another involved people whose cars were being repossessed, but they could save them by answering trivia questions. And then on our most recent holiday, there were several episodes in a row of a series which followed a family of duck hunters. For this, they expect people to pay $60 a month in cable fees?
Sure, we watch our share of stuff on Netflix or iTunes. He’s pickier than me; I have been working my way through several seasons of crime dramas all summer long while he agonizes to select a single movie. But in the last week or so, he’s tiring even of those and last night, he spent ten minutes looking before finally asking if we could just sit together and read.
Hear that, entertainment industry? That’s just the problem, in my view. It’s not about getting cable from a provider versus watching it online. It’s that once you get online, there is more stuff you can do than just watch things. You can read, play games, do video chats with loved ones, start a business or make a webpage, keep a blog, go shopping…the list goes on and on. Cable is not just competing with ‘other ways to watch cable.’ It’s competing with the whole internet. And it has to make itself interesting enough that people will want to spend not just money on it, but time.
America’s reality TV fare has become the culture: abysmal.
At the call center where I work during the week, we don’t tend to get a choice in what the TV shows. Sometimes, it’s reality shows. I don’t really mind fare like Pawn Stars or American Picker, because it’s at least interesting to see all the old crap people have in storage and what they think it’s worth. And sometimes we get Mythbusters, which is pretty awesome, or Modern Marvels or How It’s Made.
But shows like the one about the people who drill for oil in their back yards made me wonder if the sharks ever worry that the people who keep flying over their heads might not make the landing.
Cable is a broken promise. When it first came along, the promise was that, unlike OTA programming, there would be no advertising. You were paying, they argued, to be free of ads.
Somewhere along the line, ads between shows crept in like a thief in the night. Then followed the ads within the show. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me.
I’m like you. I don’t have cable, but I watch it when I travel, which I do every couple of months. It constantly reminds me as to why I made the right choice.
I gave up on TVCable in 1997. I don’t think I’ve missed much in sixteen years. My wife insists we still subscribe in case her mother visits for the weekend, but the TV usually stays off for weeks or months at a time.
Susan brings up an interesting point; can travel displacement provide an authentic sampling method for media evaluation? Yes, if you are normally disconnected from bias of other media routines. This is a strange notion…that screen and print books for example could be sampled objectively if the person wasn’t a reading fanatic!