Will Comcast, Cablevision, Charter and the rest of the cable industry manage to turn around their leaking subscriber numbers? Will consumers decide that they've had enough of retransmission fee fights and turn to services like ivi TV for their programming? Can Hulu really convince TV viewers that a day late really is better than $79 a month short? Maybe.
A Tech Crunch article suggests that the times, they are a changin' in the cable industry, so much so that the often pronounced death of cable TV may be closer now than it ever has been before.
Consumers actually have discovered alternative routes to their TV content, and continue to discover new ones, that could turn the dial on the cable industry. Hulu's next-day catch-up play, of course, is one of the major channels consumers have chosen, but Netflix, web-based services like ivi TV, and other emerging services are putting the bite on cable growth, as last quarter's 711,000 subscriber drop off showed. And this month J.D. Power and Associates report shows pretty clearly that cable has lost its panache. Consumers are dissatisfied with cable and feel more ripped off by the service than do IPTV or satellite customers.
For more:
- see this article
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