HDTV Almanac - Pay TV Services Lose 0.5 Million Subs

[alfredpoor]

Are people unhappy with their pay TV subscriptions? Is the bad economy wiping out the money that people are willing to spend on television entertainment? According to the second quarter earnings reports, the cable and satellite television services lost a net of 553,000 subscribers in the second quarter of this year. Only DirecTV picked up [...]

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[wjhunt]

Here’s a vote for the economy being the reason. We cancelled Directv this year, a very difficult decision btw. For us it was purely economic. With the price of everything on the rise, combined with cuts we’d already made to other luxuries, something had to give. Basically it came down to Internet, Satellite or cell phone. We chose satellite, figuring we could “get by” with TV from the ‘Net. We do have a Netflix account as well. I have a house full of sports fans though, so while Netflix is OK for movies and shows, we are suffering. It has not been as easy a transition as I thought it would be. However paying 90-100 a month for a BASIC tv package (meaning no premium channels) is no longer an option. So we will just miss out on some things, and purchase others a la carte online. My wife recently watched the Tour De France online for instance.

[tnsprin]

One thing not made clear. Were the new AT&T and Verizon subscribers include in the total, or is the actual loss lower if they were included.