According to GigaOm, In the last 3 months over 193,000 people have stopped paying their cable bills. As a matter of fact, most of them just get rid of it all together for a more affordable option – Online Streaming.
But is this only being done by the poor who can’t afford cable anymore?
While cable and internet are one of the first things to go when you are suffering from a bad economy, most of the time we try to bring them back as fast as possible. We all know that we can’t live without facebook, or without our favorite TV Show.
It is true that many people ditch out their services early on, most of the people that ditch them out are the “basic” cable subscribers, the ones that bring in a tiny profit to the big companies. For the majority, they are the ones that cause more problems then they are worth.
Basic cable offers you the already “free” channels and a couple of pointless news channels. So people who have basic cable instantly cut the chord in an effort to save more money. But they aren’t the only ones doing it. In my opinion we pay to much for the services that we are offered. We down graded our cable selection on Verizon FIOZ from a $199 down to a $120 and we still think that’s to much for our cable service, no, it’s not because were poor, but I’m never home because of work. Usually when I get out of work I watch TV shows that I missed on line. My wife is always at work and school so she never watches TV Show either. So we thought we were paying to much for our shows.
We did our math one morning and set up a small chart that was going to keep track of how many hours we watched television on a month. out of 720 hours in a month, we watched television for 23 hours. Out of that, we watched 11 movies, all of those movies were available on Netflix… without the commercials. That’s less than an hour a day. We were paying $8 per hour to watch TV. That’s way more than minimum wage, and almost half of what I was making at work. So we dropped the price down to $120, installed netflix and now we watch netflix all the time. Our $120 subscription is now WAY to much because we never watch TV anymore thanks to netflix.
So while GigaOm might be right that people are cutting the cable chord because they are on a low budget, I think they also have to take into consideration the fact that people are no longer wanting to pay for something that they can get for free. Not because of the lack of money, but because it’s a waste of money, why would you pay me $200 a month to do absolutely nothing?
