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Businesses Television The Almighty Buck Entertainment Technology

The Cable TV Industry Is Getting Even Less Popular (fortune.com) 104

Posted by msmash from the downfall dept.
Aaron Pressman, writing for Fortune: It seems nobody loves their cable TV or home Internet provider. Wireless carriers, however, are on the upswing.That's the news from the huge annual survey of 43 industries from the American Customer Satisfaction Index. In 2017, cable operators and ISP tied for last place, with an average customer satisfaction rating of just 64 percent. The wireless industry was still near the bottom of the rankings, in 38th place, just below the U.S. postal system. But its 73 percent score was up almost three percentage points from last year. Many of the same companies, like Comcast and Verizon, dominate both fields, ACSI noted. And neither industry offer much choice to consumers, with most localities having only one or two cable and Internet providers. The cable industry's rating slipped 1.5 percentage points from last year, while the rating for ISPs was unchanged.
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The Cable TV Industry Is Getting Even Less Popular More

The Cable TV Industry Is Getting Even Less Popular

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  • The half a million who switched to streaming services are the ones who are actually dissatisfied.* The ones who keep paying a monthly bill for cable TV are satisfied enough.

    They'll whine to survey callers, but push comes to shove, the cable companies don't really care if the bills are paid and these people acknowledge sufficient value to continue.

    Economists don't give surveys very much credence.

    * excepting the very small minority who can get cable TV but not cable Internet

    • Re:Actions (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sperbels ( 1008585 ) on Thursday May 25, 2017 @12:14PM (#54484963)

      The half a million who switched to streaming services are the ones who are actually dissatisfied.* The ones who keep paying a monthly bill for cable TV are satisfied enough.

      Actually, no, I'm not dissatisfied streaming. What I was dissatisfied with was having 200 channels of mostly unwatchable garbage, paying $100 a month for commercial ridden shows that I didn't really want to watch.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I don't think it's the service itself that people hate. It's the fact that customer loyalty is now punished instead of rewarded. If you stay with any service provider for more than a few years, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. Your price just keeps going up and up, as they increasingly treat you like a sheep ready for fleecing. Car insurance is a perfect example. Loyal customers used to be rewarded with lower costs. Now they take the opposite approach: loyal customers are seen as the sheep with

        • I actually managed not to see a car insurance bill a few years back, resulting in me not paying and my coverage being cancelled. When I signed back up with the same insurer, I actually got a better rate as a new customer who had defaulted on their last payment than I had as a customer continually paying my bills on time.

      • What I was dissatisfied with was having 200 channels of mostly unwatchable garbage, paying $100 a month for commercial ridden shows that I didn't really want to watch.

        I'm old enough to remember when cable TV was originally sold as "commercial free". See, we were going to pay for a subscription to have all this wonderful programming sent to us without the annoying ads.

        Also, it was sold as "interactive". I mean, there were special controllers and everything. And there would be plenty of bandwidth for publ

      • I'm dissatisfied streaming, but that's because in the last two years I've seen my Suddenlink Internet bill (after calling them to negotiate a lower price each year) go up by 66%, from $30/mo. to $50/mo., despite having the exact same 50 Mbps connection with a 250GB/mo. data cap the entire time. It's the lowest tier of service they offer, so there are no cheaper options through them. In my repeated searches for alternatives (cable, DSL, WISP, satellite, whatever), what I've discovered is that their biggest c

    • I pay a monthly bill because I would be paying most of it to have an internet connection on its own anyway, so I might as well pay the extra $10 for basic cable or whatever.

    • You are off by over an order of magnitude.

      Cable subscribers have dropped by over 8 million households since 2017.

      And the longterm trend is towards the European model with much lower rates of subscriptions except for sports fans.

      Business Insider estimates it will cut the value of media companies (esp Viacom) by about 40%.

    • Re:Actions (Score:4, Interesting)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday May 25, 2017 @12:59PM (#54485397) Homepage Journal

      The half a million who switched to streaming services are the ones who are actually dissatisfied.*
      [...]
      * excepting the very small minority who can get cable TV but not cable Internet

      What about the very sizable group that can get high-speed internet access only from a cable company which offers them a discount cable, internet, and phone service bundled which makes it actually cheaper to have cable? Those people can be cable subscribers, and yet dissatisfied with cable, and also be rational consumers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      The catch is that the cable internet will be the same crap company that provides the cable TV. Available internet options may have data caps too low to support replacing cable TV with streaming. Or they may mysteriously have a bunch of dropped packets when you try to stream from any popular service they don't own. They will definitely not do any of the logical engineering they would do if they were internet only (such as placing caching systems on their network to relieve upstream traffic).

      The problem is th

    • Cable companies don't care that they're hemmorrhaging millions of customers? wtf are you smoking

  • Wonder why the postal system is ranked so low? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25, 2017 @12:05PM (#54484885)
    Seriously, I never have any problems with lost mail, it arrives dependably and at the same time every day, and even with the frequent stamp price increases it still seems like a bargain to send something coast-to-coast in a couple of days for less than a buck.

    The only bad thing I might have to say would involve standing in line at the post office, but even that is not really necessary very often anymore with online postage and pickup. I think the US Postal Service should get very high marks. Maybe I just don't use it enough.

    • Re:Wonder why the postal system is ranked so low? (Score:5, Informative)

      by H3lldr0p ( 40304 ) on Thursday May 25, 2017 @12:25PM (#54485051) Homepage

      It's another disinformation campaign that's been going on for some time. There are a few congressional members who have been aiming to rid us of the Post Office and sell off pieces of it to their buddies. They've been making sure that the PO's budget can't balance through making them pre-pay pensions for a very unreasonable amount of time as well as shrinking the amount they can charge for stamps.

      That doesn't even get into the political battle over letting the PO act as a bank for low income people. Which it did at one time but was removed in the late sixties and completely shut down by 1984.

      • Re:Wonder why the postal system is ranked so low? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Insightfill ( 554828 ) on Thursday May 25, 2017 @01:43PM (#54485773) Homepage

        It's another disinformation campaign that's been going on for some time. There are a few congressional members who have been aiming to rid us of the Post Office and sell off pieces of it to their buddies. They've been making sure that the PO's budget can't balance through making them pre-pay pensions for a very unreasonable amount of time as well as shrinking the amount they can charge for stamps.

        That doesn't even get into the political battle over letting the PO act as a bank for low income people. Which it did at one time but was removed in the late sixties and completely shut down by 1984.

        The US postal system is also one of the largest single union employers in the country. Yet another reason that many are trying to "drowned it in a bathtub."

        The Post Office is additionally hamstrung by Congress micro-managing it. Want to get rid of Saturday delivery? No. Want to raise the price of a stamp? No. It's really quite tragic. Like that story about the boy who keeps commanding a grasshopper to jump and pulling off legs each time it fails, then loudly proclaiming that it must be deaf.

    • The amount of junk mail has become staggering.

      I should be getting 8 envelopes a month in my mail box.

      I get a pile over a foot high. And there have been times critical bills were buried in with junk mail.

      • The amount of junk mail has become staggering.

        I get lots of junk too. Like bills and collection notices. All that stuff goes unopened into trash.

    • The only bad thing I might have to say would involve standing in line at the post office, but even that is not really necessary very often anymore with online postage and pickup.

      The only reason you don't have to stand in line in spite of the volume of package that USPS carries is that UPS and FedEx do all the work of processing most of the small packages into the system, then they hand them off to the USPS... which would be out of business now if it didn't have those packages to carry. The USPS would also be out of business if not for residential spam, which has a massive environmental cost. The USPS literally exists now only as a spam delivery system.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Altrag ( 195300 )

        And bank statements and letters from your grandma and any number of other things that UPS and FedEx either don't bother with or charge insane rates to handle.

        Yes, the volume of legitimate mail may well be dwarfed by the volume of junk mail, but until there's another viable alternative for sending such things the USPS is still fairly necessary.

        Perhaps in a couple of generations when all the grandmas are genx / millenials and are happy to use email instead of writing, and all the banks have (maybe) caught up

        • Perhaps in a couple of generations when all the grandmas are genx / millenials and are happy to use email instead of writing, and all the banks have (maybe) caught up and those mail-in rebates you get can be punched in via the internet and so on.. perhaps then USPS can finally be left to die. But that's still a couple decades off at least (especially the grandmas -- we still have two or three generations of pre-internet elderly who are unwilling to learn how to do things digitally.)

          Well, I agree with you. Hell, last I checked my mother was refusing to get internet access. She's really not old enough to opt out of society, but that's where she was. She had a substantially older boyfriend who had internet access so she wasn't completely cut off from reality, but he died.

          Or of course FedEx could see an opportunity for letter delivery service and start charging reasonable rates for USPS-level delivery. Which of course would mean the spammers would just start sending things with FedEx cause lets face it, FedEx isn't going to say no to however many thousands of dollars the spammers pay to get their junk mail to your doorstep.

          Well, what's a "reasonable rate"? If they were allowed to just stuff it into your mailbox, they could probably deliver a letter from grandma (or a bank statement to her) for around a dollar. The bank might choose to send

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Altrag ( 195300 )

            Well, what's a "reasonable rate"?

            An absolute dollar value isn't something I can claim -- it would depend entirely on how long it takes for such a thing to happen (if ever) and what the economic conditions are going to be by then. Given the way the US is going under Trump, $1 might not even be reasonable in 8 years for most Americans since they'll be too busy paying for the tax breaks the rich are getting. Then again if in the extremely unlikely scenario where Trump's version of trickle down somehow works better than Reagan's did, maybe $

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by swb ( 14022 )

      I've had the same experience, but I think in some parts of the country it may be more problematic. There have been a few well-publicized incidents of couriers hoarding/dumping mail rather than delivering it.

      It's probably statistically rare overall, but I have to believe that it must happen more than we know about, if not commonly, then periodically.

      I'd also guess that in dense urban areas, there's probably also a fair amount of mail theft, bad mailbox setups which lead to mail theft or misdelivery, and som

    • Have you ever dealt with the post office in person? I had to go pick up a package that was supposed to be delivered to the door and signed for. After waiting in line for 20+ minutes, verifying my ID, I had to write with a "touch pen" on a "touch screen" My full name, then address, then you have to wait while the human on the other side, looks at the crappily written on a touch screen, back to the name address, back to the screen back to the typed address.

      Or attempted to resolve a problem over the phone? Set

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Altrag ( 195300 )

        Sure, but how often do you have to do that? I guess if you're a big ebayer perhaps quite often but for the vast majority of the population their interaction with USPS amounts to "is there mail in my mailbox today?"

        Of course when I call up and ask about your experience with USPS, you don't really think about the thousands of times mail was just in your mailbox -- you just pick it up and get on with your day. Instead, you think about the one crappy trip to the depot.

        Heck even if you go to the depot frequent

    • Why are you standing in line at the post office? They have these cool machines you can use to buy postage and then just put it into the box. Or you can use their website to pay and print a shipping label and just take it to the post office and put it in the box

      Only the idiots are standing in line at the post office

    • I recently tracked a package.

      For the first 593 miles it was in the hands of a private enterprise: âoeBestway Parcel Services.â This took 14.1 hours. Average speed: 42 miles per hour

      Then an agency of the government [wikipedia.org] got hold of it (the United States Postal Service). The last 72 miles took 192 hours. Average speed: 0.37 miles per hour

      I sent feedback to USPS.com. Since I was able to provide the package tracking number, one would think they would want to investigate where the process went so wro

  • I don't have a choice (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The only service I have through Mediacom is internet. Their service is ok for the price. But their customer service is horrible, they talk down to you and treat you like you're the enemy. I got a DMCA violation for downloading a CD that I owned. So I cleared all copies of it out of everywhere. Yet somehow it happened again. They insisted that it can still be uploading even if I don't have a bittorrent client installed as long as I have the .torrent file. They shut off my internet. So we got a new account in

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mentil ( 1748130 )

      Two copyright incidents and they shut off your internet? I've only ever heard of '3 strikes', which was later changed to '7 strikes', and in both cases you wouldn't actually get your internet access permanently shut down even after the max number of strikes. ISPs have been loathe to actually disconnect their internet customers because they're then choosing to NOT take your money, usually copyright enforcers have to take the ISP to court to try and get them to actually disconnect anyone.
      Maybe they talked dow

  • How to Fix your Comcast Cable Modem (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ... with gasoline [youtube.com].

  • I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything, except a whopping monthly bill for channels I'd never watch...

    • With ESPN dying and more and more sports ending up online, I'd say the reasons for anyone to want cable television are rapidly dying. It's actually amazing to watch an industry collapse. Mind you, most cable carriers are also ISPs, so they get their pound of flesh either way. The really vulnerable sector is the big TV networks, who are going to have to retool fairly quickly, because I think cable TV is likely going to fall off a cliff rather than simply fade away.

      • Blackouts. I can't get my local team online due to dumb-ass blackout rules, without using a VPN. I have cable for my baseball and hockey fix.

        I can get it streaming through the Fox Sports app, but it asks for my cable company info to prove I already get their channel.

        • But how much longer is that going to last? Once cable viewership falls below a certain threshold the sports leagues are going to jump ship in a hurry, and either find a new middle man to broadcast games online, or simply make their own. The whole business model only works so long as the cable companies can guarantee the leagues and advertisers sufficient viewers. That's why I think cord cutting, when it reaches a critical mass, is simply going to see cable TV collapse. There's a point at which it isn't sust

  • Do people get cable subscriptions so they can be popular by purchasing something popular?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Altrag ( 195300 )

      Uhh, no. I'm not sure if they ever did. And now its more popular to be a cable cutter. Netflix and chill yall.

      Historically (as in, before you could stream or torrent essentially anything,) if you were the only one on your block to have cable then you would have likely been pretty popular. Similarly if everyone had cable but you were the only one with the premium channels, you'd be similarly popular. Especially among teenage boys (Skinimax what?)

      But now that porn is one "Yes, I'm 18" click away whether

      • >> None of those amounts to "because its worth having."

        +1 well said ... the important things are easy to overlook.

  • In 2006 my 20Mbps connection cost me 30 bucks a month. I had no TV service. Then they switched each tier's speed, and made my server faster, but bumped the cost up. Now in 2017 its 90Mbs (at the same tier, 2nd from the top, 2nd from the bottom - the middle of 3) for 90 a month. Now, you would THINK that I could just lower my tier down. But the QoS and throughput scale down drastically such that my mid -tier 2006 service is better than my bottom tier 2017 service. So I am stuck paying 90 a month for w

    • You can get 25mb for $58 from comcast. I think that's the slowest option any more.
      They toss in basic cable plus a premium channel for $10 (hard to resist).

      The 25mb seemed to have higher latency a couple years ago (you tube videos took a second to start instead of starting instantly) but that's gone and now it seems identical to the normal service.

      • Yes, but then you're stuck with Comcast. And they're terrible.

        A friend of mine has been having troubling streaming a livestream of his games, so he called his provider, Comcast.

        The tech drone at the other end couldn't solve his problem (hardly unique to Comcast), and elevated it to second-tier, which was supposed to get back to him the next day. That was last week. He finally got the callback yesterday.

        Turns out his modem is at end-of-life. Even though it worked fine at his previous address (which was also

  • Cable TV is grossly over priced.

    I suspect they've found that the profit yield curve peaks for them selling $240 packages to the top 20% who don't care about price.

    I cut the cord on cable TV and if money ever gets tight, my cell bandwidth is now high enough and fast enough that I'll probably kill cable internet and use my cell for internet.

    Cable TV used to cost about 8 minimum wage hours back when it started. And that was with the two premium channels. And it had a fewer commercials. Now it's easy to hit

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JDeane ( 1402533 )

      I was just talking to my wife about this the other day, I remember about 20 years ago that cable for basic (Florida) was about 20 dollars a month. Yes there was a lot less commercials and for the most part the programming was in my opinion slightly better. Fast forward to today and the quality is virtually non existent beyond the exception here and there. The price for just basic is more than double the price unless you "bundle" and then it's still at 60* dollars before taxes and fee's.

      I believe that the ca

  • I'm surprised - airline industry? (Score:3)

    by dpilot ( 134227 ) on Thursday May 25, 2017 @12:52PM (#54485327) Homepage Journal

    I'm rather surprised that the Cable / ISPs managed to beat the airline industry here. Must be either short-term memory, or maybe a lot of people don't fly often.

    At least the Cable / ISPs don't physically drag you away from your TV or computer screen. Nor are you at all liekly to need pat-down searches for TV or internet.

    • That's because the ISP's take more of an organized crime approach. They know you don't have a choice and they are more than happy to charge you top dollar for shit service. They are also more than happy to offer crap you didn't ask for and raise your payments at a moments notice.

      I'd say they are like a protection ring, but you won't get a bloody nose for refusal to pay/comply.

    • I'm rather surprised that the Cable / ISPs managed to beat the airline industry here. Must be either short-term memory, or maybe a lot of people don't fly often.

      At least the Cable / ISPs don't physically drag you away from your TV or computer screen. Nor are you at all liekly to need pat-down searches for TV or internet.

      No, but if I couldn't FF, the commercials would drive me away from the TV, yelling "Enough! No more!" at the top of my lungs.

  • If you are steaming there is no way to legally watch games. NHL Center Ice? Laughable. No local games and even then games are rarely covered.

    I think I've decided that if they don't want me to watch, I will oblige them.

  • Hardly surprising (Score:3)

    by Mordaximus ( 566304 ) on Thursday May 25, 2017 @01:41PM (#54485753)

    An hour time slot is filled with 40 minutes of actual content, the remainder being commercials. There's no better painful reminder of this than Netflix. Go back and find a show from the 80s, or the 90s and note the playtime, and compare it to today. And the way the bundles are set up, you end up having to pay an extra $40 just to get the one channel that was actually worthwhile.

    There was a time where TLC was actually about learning. And A&E was about arts and entertainment. They are an utter waste of time now.

    Choke on your lost profits, cable companies.

    • An hour time slot is filled with 40 minutes of actual content, the remainder being commercials. There's no better painful reminder of this than Netflix. Go back and find a show from the 80s, or the 90s and note the playtime, and compare it to today.

      What bugs me is, when I watch one of those old shows on MeTV, I find significant parts are cut out to make room for the commercials.

    • H&G used to be about home repairs and gardening. Now it is nothing but house flipping. Although a lot of these programs come from Canada where the housing bubble is only now just bursting. Weather used to have more weather related programs. Then they started to fill it up with reality crap. At least until Verizon replaced Weather with Crapuweather, so I haven't seen it lately. Travel once had potential. Now it is really more informercials for various resorts or cruise lines. Smithsonian is usua

  • Just wait for comcast to pull an ATT and force you to rent the gateway as part of there IPTV system even for Internet only subs. Right now with business planes with static ip you have to rent there hardware at an added cost on top of the static ip fee.

  • Local governments choose who will be the provider for a given market.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Altrag ( 195300 )

      Not that I'll try to claim outright corruption is unheard of by any means, but usually this isn't so much a question of monopoly vs competition as it is a question of monopoly vs nothing at all.

      That is, there were many instances (especially in rural areas) where the providers were claiming that they couldn't justify the investment if they had to face competition. Whether or not those claims were valid is anyone's guess, but valid or not they still weren't going to build out into those areas without a monop

  • Last show I felt somewhat worthwhile was 24. Even that got stale. I'm not sure why we have a TV.
  • I'll never understand the price point of cable. It's not like you have full access to every show at any time like you have Netflix, and with only 24 hours/day (only a few of which you are awake, at home, and able to watch TV) you'll never come close to watching the entire library of programming available (especially with all the adverts tossed in). Why not charge a respectable $30-$50 a month for the entire package of channels, then maybe charge a small premium for the sports/movie channels? I'm also cur

  • Why is the postal service so low? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I've had much better service from USPS than UPS. UPS is brown for a reason

  • .....for dumping cable TV. I'm expecting a price increase / bend over any minute now from TWC. I know it's coming and when it does they will get the old FU from me. Like many others I've had enough. They are SLOWLY killing themselves off and I love it.

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