Making the rounds this week is a report from media analyst consulting firm Yankee Group that says 1 in 8 cable TV customers will cancel or downgrade their service in 2010 due to the increasing availability of video content online and/or the seemingly endless increases in cable service prices.
Here’s a little poll for those of you stopping by. Please feel free to add your vote. Poll remains active until midnight of May 15:
The idea that someday people would be able to get all of their television programming completely on demand from some video service in the ether has been talked about for the last fifteen years, but has really only been viable for the last couple of years, since it took most of that time for all of the necessary elements to converge — bandwidth, service providers, ubiquity of network access, quality of video streaming, etc. Like a lot of other disruptive technologies, it needed some sort of Gladwellian “tipping point” to cross over from something only being done by a small niche market of early adopters to being “the next big thing”, and it seems that the tipping point isn’t so much the tech as it is the economy. Who wants to pay a couple of hundred dollars a month for a bajillion channels they never watch, when they can get almost anything they want free or for a lot less? That appeals to just about everyone, not just me and my web-savvy buddies.
I had been fence-sitting about going cable-free for a long time. I’ve followed the development of the various online content services and the associated developments like set-top boxes for several years, but every time I thought I might be ready to pull the trigger, my inner geezer convinced me that sticking with things the way they were was just fine. However, a few weeks ago we started using Netflix’s instant streaming using our Nintendo Wii, and the experience has been so positive that it may be the necessary shove I needed. To be sure, there are still just enough hoops to jump through that I think the 1-in-8 rate isn’t going to go much higher, but that’s still a pretty remarkable number.
I know that most of my friends and family are a lot further behind on the adoption curve than I am, so I am interested to see what you all might have to say. Thanks in advance for taking a moment to answer the poll.
