Are You Still Paying for Cable TV??? Ms. Bels Friday, August 3, 2012 The Receipt, The Script, Your Money and You Remember when “having cable” at home was the BIG thing?? Well, those days are almost over. With television networks offering online videos of their most popular shows, people are dropping their cable service left and right. Nowadays, you can find any of your favorite shows online…just search on Youtube. Cable networks are now feeling the wrath. Since the recession hit a few years back, thousands of subscribers have ditched the dish. In 2010, approximately 170, 000 customers dropped their service. In 2011, close to 200,000 canceled their service (and that was in the 2nd quarter alone). Move forward to 2012, Direct Tv recently announced that their company lost 56,000 customers (2nd quarter). We wonder if the Viacom dispute played a major part in that. Nevertheless, Time Warner also announced that it has losses up to 170,000 (2nd quarter). According to Reuters, the Time Warner situation has experienced a downfall for quite some time now. “Basic video subscriber losses aren’t getting better,” Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett told Reuters about Time Warner. Reuters points out that while Time Warner still has 12.3 million customers, this is the company’s 10th quarter in a row with customer losses. Should we “pay-tv customers” feel any way about their losses? Probably not! The cost for cable service is ridiculous. Most households pay over $100 per month to look at a few channels. No one really watch at over 300 channels. Who has the time too?? Also, the extra charges for HBO, Encore, Cinemax, etc and the charges for each cable box in your home is reason enough to “kill your bill”. Cable providers should cut us some slack. If not, there will be more pay-tv customers cancelling their service. They can just take notes from telecommunications companies (i.e. AT&T). They experienced losses in the landline circuit due to customers relying on their cellphone for day-to-day calls. Everybody like finding ways to save a buck. And hopping online to watch whatever you want is a excellent coin saver. But we’re sure cable providers do not want that to happen, for real.
