We have gotten some flack on social media concerning our recent article that stated that Cord Cutting Is Not A Real Thing. And I understand why some people reacted the way that they did. They think somehow we missed that there are people all over the country deciding that they no longer want to pay a cable company to watch TV anymore. Trust me, I am quite aware that people are doing that. In fact, I have personally helped dozens of people in my life do so effectively. The point I was making was more that people make too big a thing out of the label “Cord Cutting”. For instance numbers from a new study show that for instance the rise in streaming popularity does not mirror the rise in people canceling pay TV services. A report by one of our favorite research firms MoffettNathanson shows that 82% of US homes use streaming services. But broken down in those numbers is that only 44 percent of those streaming customers do not have cable.
Too often writers in the tech world have tied the popularity of services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and HBO Max to the need to replace cable with a streaming service, but it turns out that millions of people out there just want more to watch along with the content in their big bundle.
The study did not include numbers for people who use services like YouTube TV, Sling TV etc. That would give us all a more complete picture of the landscape as there are more than 16 million people subscribed to such cable replacement services as we call them. Can you say you don’t use pay TV just because your pay TV service does not come from the cable company or are you just getting a pay TV service at a better price than you would otherwise?
