[opendtv] News: ESPN Says Study Shows Little Effort to Cut Cable
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: OpenDTV Mail List <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2010 07:31:46 -0500
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/business/media/06espn.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a26
ESPN Says Study Shows Little Effort to Cut Cable
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: December 5, 2010
Seeking to understand the cutting of cable cords, ESPN has waded into
the Nielsen Company's audience sample and concluded that the
cancellations are currently a "very minor" phenomenon.
The sports network's study provides a new answer, or at least a new
set of data, for a question that looms over the television industry:
how many Americans are dropping their costly cable subscriptions and
watching TV on the Internet instead?
This action, often called cord-cutting, has happened in 0.28 percent
of households in the United States in the last three months, ESPN
found in a study that it plans to release on Monday.
Offsetting those losses, though, 0.17 percent of households that had
been broadcast-only signed up for pay TV and broadband.
"So the net amount of cord-cutting for one quarter was just one-tenth
of 1 percent," said Glenn Enoch, the vice president for integrated
media research for ESPN.
The study is significant because the prospect of cord-cutting has
deeply worried television executives. Established players like ESPN
that depend on subscriber revenue have been eager to figure out how
much cord-cutting is going on - and to dispel myths about the
behavior.
"We got a little worn out reading headline after headline saying,
'Cord-cutting, it's a disaster; young people are abandoning TV.' For
our strategic purposes, we needed to know what was really going on,"
Mr. Enoch said.
The research comes from the same sample that Nielsen uses to project
TV ratings. Nielsen verified ESPN's findings.
Similarly, data from the research firm SNL Kagan found that 119,000
customers dropped their cable or satellite subscriptions in the third
quarter of this year. There are about 100 million subscriptions
nationwide.
Pat McDonough, the senior vice president for planning, policy and
analysis at Nielsen, said the ESPN study confirmed that while there
are some cord-cutters, "it's a really small number of people."
More people, she added, are "swapping cable cords, rather than
cutting them." Cable providers have lost some customers to satellite
or telecommunications providers in recent years.
Mr. Enoch said ESPN would monitor cord-cutting behavior every three
months using the Nielsen sample. The amount of cord-cutting could
pick up over time, but networks like ESPN are limiting the amount of
video they make available on the Internet without a subscription
partly to prevent that.
Sporting events are particularly hard to watch free online, so it
comes as little surprise that the Nielsen sample found that among
heavy and medium viewers of sports, the research showed what Mr.
Enoch called "zero cord-cutting."
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