EXAMPLE OF CABLE SUSCRIBERS CUTTING THE CORD

On Friday I posted an article on  how its expected that people will begin cutting their cable service. Today, via BigHollywood, I found a article from The Wrap talking about this very thing.

Comcast shares were up more than 5 percent in early trading Wednesday after the company beat Wall Street earnings forecasts, reported that it had significantly cut cable customer losses, and announced a dividend increase and $6.5 billion share repurchase plan.

The country's largest cable company lost 17,000 video customers in the fourth quarter, down from 135,000 subscribers in the same quarter in 2010. It also decreased cable losses for the year by nearly 40 percent over 2010.

Then there is this from the mighty John Nolte.

DHD dismisses this, but I don’t think they understand how tired many of us are of paying outrageous cable bills for television we don’t watch:

Aereo[,] [t]he company, backed in part by Barry Diller, just announced that it will go live in New York City on March 14. Residents willing to pay $12 a month will be able to stream signals from local over-the-air TV channels, and watch their shows on demand with the functionality of a 40-hour, dual antenna DVR. The service will only work as long as users are in the local market — not, say, if they’re on a vacation or business trip. Aereo execs expect lots of people to subscribe, perhaps in conjunction with Netflix, as a substitute for the $65 a month cable or satellite TV package. That could be revolutionary, Greenfield writes today in a blog post: “If Aereo is in fact legal, we find it hard to fathom that the traditional (pay TV) bundle will survive and that retrans payments will continue to scale as broadcasters are expecting them to over the next several years.” If he’s right, then it’s the end of the media world as we know it. The giants make most of their profits from the fees they collect for their bundled channels.

That last sentence is crucial: The giants make most of their profits from the fees they collect for their bundled channels.

And that’s the scam. This appalling reality where neither your local cable company or the two primary satellite providers allow you to purchase only what you want to watch is an unspoken monopoly. Most of us are paying obnoxiously high bills for only a few channels.

As gas prices rise people are not going to pay $60 USD per month to watch 3 channels. If the price of goods continues to rise from high gas prices we could easily see a return of cable subscriber  losses of over 100K per quarter again very soon. It's something to watch very closely.