If there is, indeed, cord cutting, it's "very minor," according to ESPN, which has done the research and concluded all the hysteria about cable subscribers leaving in droves is just that: hysteria.
"We got a little worn out reading headline after headline saying, 'Cord-cutting, it's a disaster; young people are abandoning TV.' For our strategic purposes, we needed to know what was really going on," Glenn Enoch, vice president for integrated media research at ESPN told the New York Times.
What the sports programmer learned is that cord cutting over one quarter was one-tenth of 1 percent, which is a "really small number of people" according to Pat McDonough, senior vice president for planning, policy and analysis at Nielsen, which provided data for the survey. Rather than cutting the cord, she said, people are "swapping" it from cable to telco to satellite and so on.
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