TiVo: Cable customers leaving over price; 79% of them have Netflix
The price for television is a growing factor and the biggest reason consumers become cable cutters, according to TiVo’s latest quarterly survey of TV trends, released Wednesday. And who much are streaming services becoming an important addition to pay-TV subscribers? 79.4 percent of them also have a Netflix account.
In its Q4 Online Video and Pay-TV Trends Report, TiVo said 86.7 percent of consumers still think pay TV is too expensive (up 6.6 percentage points from last year’s survey) and a whopping 81.3 percent of people surveyed (up 4.7 percent from a year ago) said they would rather have the option to buy individual channels through a la carte.
According to its fourth-quarter survey of more than 3,300 consumers, the survey found 85.2 percent subscribed to pay TV. That’s up slightly from a year ago, but the increase from 83 percent was within the study’s margin of error.
The report found that 49 percent of respondents to the North American survey pay US$51-US$100 per month for a cable or satellite service while another 20 percent pay $126 or more.
The number of people who said they’ve never had cable or satellite service dropped to 28.4 percent from more than 30 percent a year ago. But the number of consumers who say it has been longer than 12 months since they had cable or satellite service rose to 52.7 percent from 48.1 percent a year ago.
“Price continues to drive respondents to cut pay-TV service,” the report’s editors commented. “For pay-TV providers, subscriber retention remains crucial—as subscribers once lost may not return.”
As for pay-TV subscribers contemplating switching services, 7.3 percent said they plan to cut service, 6.5 percent planned to change pay-TV providers, 5.7 percent said they planned to switch to an online streaming service, and 29.9 percent said “maybe” they’ll make a change.
Elsewhere, TiVo found that 68.2% of people now use a video-on-demand service, like Netflix, Amazon Prime, or a live streaming service like YouTube TV or Sling TV, up 4.4 percentage points year-on-year, up 12.8 percent over two years and up 22.9 percent over the past four years.
Unsurprisingly, the top three most-used services were Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu, with all three services experiencing gains year-on-year.
YouTube TV was fourth following its introduction last year, DirecTV Now was eighth, Sling TV was ninth, followed by PlayStation Vue, Hulu with Live TV, and FuboTV, according to the report.
About the Author
Brad Gibson Brad is co-founder and editor-in-chief of BESTAppleTV.com. He has been a technology reporter since the late 1980s having previously worked for MacUser, MacFormat, and iCreate magazines, as well as MacNN.com, MacObserver.com, MacCentral.com, MacMinute.com, and Macworld.com. He hosted and produced the MacFormat This Week podcast for three years. He was also a reporter, editor, and producer for the Associated Press and United Press International.
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