What the Cable Industry used to say about Cord Cutting

[ncted]

I wish it'd stop being called "cutting the cord", unless it is on Dish's new 5G streaming service, exclusive to Boost Infinite subscribers.

People didn't cut the cord, they went a la carte (older people) or they never got the cord (younger people). A great deal of people want access to cable and sat channels. They just want it on demand and without the equipment costs. The technology exists for that to be a things these days. And people wouldn't be "cutting the cord" if the producers weren't putting their stuff on streaming services. The losers in all of this are really Dish and Directv who weren't in the production business of media. They were a reseller. Comcast, Time Warner had skin on both sides.

In the end, not much is changing, just how you get the media.

It is always nice to see a fellow pedant active online.

Cutting the cord originally meant ditching cable for OTA, so it made sense. Then it meant that plus watching Netflix, which ok, sure. Now it means primarily subscribing to streaming, even if it is really just cable-like services delivered over IP instead of old-school broadcast methods, so it it really cord-cutting anymore?

The media and humans in general tend to latch on to a term and apply it to things that are similar in their minds, even it the original idea is mostly lost in the process, especially if it is a trending term that will attract eyeballs and get clicks. See also "cloud" and "fintech" over the same time period. There is still a kernel of the original idea there, but that isn't the primary definition anymore.

 

[NashGuy]

It is always nice to see a fellow pedant active online.

Cutting the cord originally meant ditching cable for OTA, so it made sense. Then it meant that plus watching Netflix, which ok, sure. Now it means primarily subscribing to streaming, even if it is really just cable-like services delivered over IP instead of old-school broadcast methods, so it it really cord-cutting anymore?

Agreed. To my mind, "cord-cutting" means ditching linear channel pay TV, i.e. MVPDs. Getting a "virtual MVPD" like YouTube TV isn't cord-cutting any more than switching from, say, Charter Spectrum TV to Dish satellite. It's all essentially the same product, just delivered using different technology.

But there's a significant difference (certainly from a business perspective) between MVPDs and direct-to-consumer streaming services like Netflix, Prime Video and Max. Including those DTCs as part of cord-cutting makes sense to me. (Although Hulu admittedly blurs the lines given that it's a DTC with a vMVPD add-on.)