"TV is Dying" isn't the crazy part of this article.
It claims people are chucking broadband subscriptions and using tablets and mobile internet, or more often, just free wifi from Starbucks (or neighbors?).
Fascinating. If everyone dropped broadband, TV, and phone lines into the home, what's that world look like?
They promise a graph showing in hard numbers that broadband subscriptions are down, but never actually provide one. They just provide a graph showing, as best I can tell, that total customers for cable companies are going down. In fact, they confusingly state that customers are moving from cable with broadband to "telco companies like AT&T and Verizon who offer TV as a package with high-speed internet access."
From the description, this apparently isn't referring to mobile Internet, but AT&T U-verse and the like. So high-speed Internet from AT&T doesn't count as broadband on the grounds that they're a telco.
My best guess is that when this whole article is founded on the strange understanding that TV through a cable provider is the only real TV while getting the same content through satellite or what-have-you is "mobile," and cable Internet is "broadband" while anything from a "telco" like AT&T is a totally different thing. A rise of alternative providers is an interesting story, but it's a pretty different story from the one they're trying to tell here where everybody is just taking their iPads to Starbucks and watching cat videos.
Yeah the article is pretty selective in statistics. Time Warner may have lost broadband subscribers, but other cable cos have seen increases in broadband subscribes while television subs decrease. And broadband is MUCH more profitable for cable cos than television because there is no content cost to pay.
On that note, he, and commenters, and saying cable is "killing itself" by raising rates. Subscription rates are actually rising more slowly than the content costs cable cos pay. The content creators are driving this process.
> Media stock analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson recently noted, "The pay-TV industry has reported its worst 12-month stretch ever." All the major TV providers lost a collective 113,000 subscribers in Q3 2013. That doesn't sound like a huge deal — but it includes internet subscribers, too.
Except the source is another BI article, and _its_ source mentions nothing about Internet subscribers:
Ha, yeah, fair point and reasonable analysis. The dozen misleading graphs that don't quite support his point are looking more suspicious by the minute.
I kind of want to call Jim Edwards and tell him this is an interesting direction for a story, but he should probably chuck this rough draft and start from scratch before someone accidentally puts this on BI's site.
It claims people are chucking broadband subscriptions and using tablets and mobile internet, or more often, just free wifi from Starbucks (or neighbors?).
Fascinating. If everyone dropped broadband, TV, and phone lines into the home, what's that world look like?