SmashMouth

Cord-cutting, or at least the speed at which people are ditching pay TV, is on track to be the biggest upset of the year. There’s finally a collection of cheap-ish streaming services widely available, and as you’d imagine, people are jumping ship from cable as fast as humanly possible.

The latest bad data points come from the Q3 earnings of all the big cable companies, which are mostly now public. DSLReports added up the damage, and it makes for bad reading if you’re a cable company exec.

“Only five of the seven biggest pay TV providers have released their third quarter subscriber data, but collectively these companies saw a net loss of 632,000 pay TV subscribers during the period (385,000 for AT&T and DirecTV, 125,000 for Comcast, 104,000 for Charter, 18.000 for Verizon FiOS TV),” DSL wrote. When you add in the un-reported numbers from Dish and Altice, that number will be near-as-makes-no-different 1 million.

To put that in perspective, a survey suggested last year that there were around 16 million cord-cutters in the US. Adding another million to that in Q3 alone shows just how fast the industry is changing.

Cable TV companies are struggling to adapt. AT&T is a prime example: the company has successfully launched DirecTV Now, one of the better internet-only streaming services. But the base package is $40, way less than the $100 that families traditionally spend on a cable bundle. Worse, AT&T is currently giving away DirecTV Now for $10 to wireless subscribers, meaning it’s not making them any real money at the moment.

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dam1953

We cut cable in February and switched to Direct TV Now. It's still kind of like being tied to the cable companies but saves me about $50 a month. As it is we watch very little network TV because most of the programming is garbage and the network new coverage is nauseating. Lately we watch mostly Netflix and Amazon programing with a bit of HBO for GOT.

SmashMouth

Same here, cord cutter. YouTube TV works great. Unlimited DVR also.

QBREES9

ESPN is dying a slow death. Direct TV rules.

jeanpierre

I'd been doing Sling and I'm about to drop that because I don't like the idea of one cent of my money going to Bloomberg or CNN and Sling doesn't have a package without those leeches...