“As a business, it is failing,” said Matthew Polka, CEO of the American Cable Association (ACA), during a C-SPAN interview. “It is very, very difficult for a cable operator in many cases to even break even on the cable side of the business, which is why broadband is so important, giving consumers more of a choice that we can’t give them on cable [TV].”
Increasingly it is not whether cable TV will collapse but when as a growing number of Americans leave pay TV every month. Although cable TV is likely not going away anytime soon, there will be a breaking point.
This all seems to come down to cord cutting, according to Polka. “It’s the video issue of our time as consumers learn they have choice,” he went on to say. “It gives consumers more choice, something that they’ve wanted for a long time, more control from the bundle of cable linear programming,” Polka said.
Now companies such as Comcast and Verizon are working quickly to find ways around this issue. Both Comcast and Verizon are hard at work on live TV streaming services. Verizon is likely to hit the market first and it could be as soon as late June 2017. They join a very crowded market of services including Sling TV, Hulu, DIRECTV NOW, PlayStation Vue, and more.
For now we will have to wait and see how pay TV as a whole responds to these new issues, but it seems clear they are worried about cord cutting.
Source: ArsTechnica
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