More television viewers ‘cutting cord’
You could take it as a sign of our enlightenment or a sign of the apocalypse that there seems to be a cable or satellite TV channel that caters to just about any interest.
Gardening? Check. Baseball? Sure. Sitcoms from the 1970s, stuffed with furniture and clothing you now can find at pricey vintage fairs? Absolutely. And let’s not forget channels devoted to home renovation, Capitol Hill committee meetings, Bollywood movies, musty Westerns, mushy love stories and on and on and on.
It’s long been the lament of some cable and satellite customers that they don’t watch the overwhelming majority of the channels available through their subscriptions, so why should they have to pay for the whole kit and caboodle? The counter-argument has always been that, by bundling channels together, the popular ones support the more specialized, niche offerings. Nevertheless, at a moment when consumers have become accustomed to maximum choice and maximum autonomy, some have decided to say sayonara to their cable or satellite subscriptions – cut the cord, if you will – and light out on their own across the TV landscape. They now watch their favorite programs through any number of combinations, from utilizing old-fashioned antenna TV to subscribing to online services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Instant Video.
Jen Presto and her family are examples. She and her husband, who live in South Strabane Township, became disenchanted with the cost of their traditional satellite-TV hookup, and the lackluster customer service they encountered. So they got an Amazon Fire Stick, “which turns your TV into a smart TV,” Presto explained, and they started downloading apps for various channels. There were some issues initially with delays and disruptions, but otherwise the Prestos have been pleased – particularly with the $100 they’ve been saving every month.
“We like to keep up with the new technology,” said Presto, an analyst for a management consulting firm in Carnegie. She admitted that her daughter has been something of a dissenter on the value of cord-cutting, “but she needs to be studying and not watching a lot of TV.”
The Prestos are one of the estimated 20 percent of American households that have cut the cord, according to a 2016 study from Convergence Consulting, a market research firm. Perhaps predictably, it’s tech-savvy young people who are stampeding away from cable and satellite services. A survey last year from Nielsen found that 38 percent of those aged 21 to 34 planned on cutting the cord, while just 15 percent of those aged 50 to 64 were so inclined.
Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University in New York, said that for many young people, “it’s a done deal.” They are used to watching favorite programs on computer screens, laptops, tablets and even phones. However, he cautioned that cord-cutting cannot really be defined as such, since a cord is needed for a computer and you need to sign on with an internet provider in order to access online video services. Cable companies have also been trying to combat cord-cutting by offering packages that combine phone, cable and internet access, and some networks require that a user have a cable subscription before they can access their web iterations.
Some cable companies are trying to keep customers in the fold by adding more services and on-demand offerings, and some have put “data caps” in place where customers are charged overage fees if they chew through too much data in a given month, which can drain the wallets of cord cutters. Before cutting the cord, a broadband connection that is sufficiently sturdy is necessary.
Cutting the cord can require patience. It can be time-consuming to download apps and pick and choose what services to sign up for. Television viewers who lack the desire to ponder whether Hulu is better than Netflix, or who just don’t want the hassle of having to purchase additional devices or figure out the how and what of downloading this or that will probably stand by cable or satellite services. The overwhelming preponderance of this cadre are grayer and no doubt remember the arrival of cable television way back when.
“Most people do not like to spend a lot of time thinking about the mechanics of entertainment television,” according to Walter Podrazik, the television curator at the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago, the co-author of the book “Watching TV,” and a lecturer in media history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “Every week you have to strategize on how you’re going to deal with it.”
He is a baby boomer old enough to remember the arrival of the Beatles in America, but he does not have cable or satellite service – he watches select programs online, watches others at the homes of friends, and organizes his viewing life without being tethered to cable or satellite.
“I don’t need 100 channels going 24/7,” he said.
In a media universe of a million choices where everything is increasingly available on demand, cord-cutting is speeding the balkanization of America’s television audience. The days when everyone watched “The Ed Sullivan Show” on Sunday nights have long since departed, but even the era when at least some of the nation’s business would stop for the final episode of “Seinfeld” or Johnny Carson’s farewell from “The Tonight Show” seems ever more distant.
“I don’t think that’s unrelated to our politics,” Thompson said. “There’s no forced center anymore.”
In the meantime, there could well be a lot more viwers like Joe Piszczor, a financial adviser and president of the Washington Rotary Club. He cut the cord because of the abundance of channels he did not watch and, like the Prestos, purchased an Amazon Fire Stick.
“If I want to watch 100 episodes of a program, I can,” Piszczor said. “These types of things are catering to the viewer.”