Although I hardly hold myself up as typical, I do spend a lot of money on DirecTV and on their baseball and football packages.. or at least I did.

I’m not paying the $300 for the MLB extra innings package this year, because I can do the MLB online package for $110, watch it in near-HD through my Roku box, and have access everywhere on my PC. That’s at least 2x better (see it everywhere, on every TV, with games available in the cloud on demand) and 1 drawback (quality is not as good).

So I just saved nearly $200. and if I could get the Patriots NFL games on demand I’d drop that Direct Ticket like a hot potato too.

It won’t be a bang, but a slow whimper. But over time it will be gone.

I wanted to follow-up on a few of the points you made. You’re correct in discussing the margin of error in surveys, and our studies do come with a margin of error of plus or minus 2%. So, yes, there can be movement from one side to the other of the data points that are presented.

The important thing for us to be tracking is whether there is movement of that population of consumers likely to cancel their pay-TV services above that margin of error from one study to the next. So far, we haven’t found it, but it’s a question that we are tracking consistently to see if movement is occurring from one study to the next.

Your comments and those from other readers have also focused on consumers in the 18-24 age range. They were included in this study, and they’ve provided some interesting insights:
- Consumers in this age range are just as likely to have a current pay-TV subscription as the other consumer age groups;
- This group of consumers is more likely to express high satisfaction with the video-on-demand and high-definition features that they are receiving from their pay-TV provider;
- They are no more likely to express dissatisfaction with the cost of their service;
- When it comes to service churn and/or cord-cutting tendencies, they are more likely than the average respondent to consider churn to a different provider, and they are swayed more with offerings of expanded VoD and high-definition channels;
- There is evidence that they are not as loyal to pay-TV as an older consumer, as their reported likelihood of cord-cutting is higher than other age groups (11% of respondents in this population); and
- Respondents in this age range are more likely to agree with the statement that “If all of the video on the Internet was available on the TV, I would no longer subscribe to [pay-TV services].”

That last bullet point about the impact of online video’s availability for viewing on a TV is one that perhaps has generated some of the most-interesting findings within the All Eyes on Video study. This survey does help to validate the notion that once alternative methods of viewing over-the-top video content (connected game consoles, connected TVs and Blu-ray players, networked digital media set-top boxes such as the Roku Player or Apple TV, etc.) grow in larger numbers, then the inclination to consider cord cutting is significantly enhanced. Our study finds that consumers who have used a connected game console or a TV connected to a PC (these are significant chunks of households … more than 12 million) to watch online video are about 3x more likely to consider cutting the cord. So, the theory that the game console could challenge the supremacy of pay-TV services is certainly validated with the results of this study.

So, how do pay-TV providers respond to this potential threat? The study results do point to the strengths of pay-TV services, which include the ever-growing libraries of video-on-demand content and expanded high-definition programming. It was these two features – and specifically the migration of high-definition content to 1080p resolution – that are two key arrows in the pay-TV providers’ quiver, as these features – if offered by an alternative provider – generate the most interest among consumers in considering a service provider switch. We even found a good percentage of consumers indicating a willingness to pay a premium for “TV Everywhere” kind of features, and we found higher interest in the 18-24 and 24-34 age ranges.

Unfortunately, the geniuses who price cable are typical MBA’s who don’t understand how to serve diverse groups of customers or calculate revenues that aren’t linearly flattened. Cable would gain customers and revenue if they simply did the hard work and let us truly buy “ala carte”, rather than forcing bundles and tiers.

This viewer pulled the plug years ago, because cable wanted more than $60 a month for the one channel we wanted to watch. We’d gladly pay to watch another 15 or so channels of our choice, but half of those required another “tier” and even further expense.

Add to that the 20-60% increase in box rental fees and the skyrocketing taxes in some cities, and we’re happy to remain unplugged for another year or more. Meanwhile, OTA is slowly adding non-traditional channels on multicast.

So we have a cable modem, only. And we’ll probably keep it that way. And we’re far from the 18-24 male demographic.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to remind them to blame their problems on the “content providers”.