Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Time Warner Cable Says It's Looking for Cord Cutters, but Can't Find Them, Either

Last week, Comcast lost 275,000 subscribers, but said those losses weren’t due to “cord cutters”–people who ditched cable TV for Web video.

So this week’s news from Time Warner Cable should have a familiar ring to it: The company lost 155,000 video subscribers, but said it couldn’t “identify any increase in cord-cutting.”

Instead, like Comcast, it said the economy was primarily to blame, as well as competition from the likes of newish video offerings from Verizon and AT&T. That is, it can’t find evidence that people are replacing cable with Hulu, Apple TV, Netflix, etc.

And, like Comcast, Time Warner Cable said that many of the video subscribers it did lose were less attractive, anyway. That’s because they were “basic” subscribers, instead of the ones who get the company’s higher-end, higher-margin offerings.

So I’m just going to lift an entire paragraph from last week’s post, and hope that at some point we’ll be able to say something new:

So we’re still stuck where we’ve been for a while: Lots of people–many of whom are the kind of people who read sites like this one–say that cord-cutting is either here or inevitable. And the incumbent cable companies say they see no sign of it.

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