entertainment

More People Like Streaming, Yet Cord-Cutting Drops

Consumers seem to be warming to the idea of meeting their entertainment needs through multiple sources, including both traditional pay-TV services and over-the-top streaming. 

According to recent J.D. Power studies of fixed-line communications (including television service providers and internet service providers), consumers are becoming more satisfied with streaming services compared with traditional cable TV. 

Those satisfaction levels, however, are not leading to a rash of cord-cutting. In fact, the percentages of consumers who say they plan to cut the cord over the next 12 months has dropped to 8% this year, from 9% in 2016. 

“A large percentage of consumers are using multiple ways to view content, and they like it,” Jeff Conklin, vice president of the Technology Media and Telecommunications practice at J.D. Power, tells Marketing Daily. “There is some [cord-cutting], but what we’re finding is consumers are happy with the mix of choices they can have … It seems it’s not going to be a sea change we had heard about, at least not in the near term.”

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At the same time, the appeal of regularly scheduled, time-slot television is growing. Consumers are spending nearly an hour more a week watching regularly scheduled TV programming than they did two years ago In a typical week, (17.4 hours in 2016 vs. 16.6 in 2015), according to the studies. 

Meanwhile, a significant majority of consumers (65%) said they never watch content from their TV provider via a mobile app (and only 6% do so on a daily basis). Those who do use the mobile apps more frequently, however, have higher satisfaction rates.

1 comment about "More People Like Streaming, Yet Cord-Cutting Drops".
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  1. Douglas Ferguson from College of Charleston, October 4, 2017 at 10:19 p.m.

    Declining rates of cord cutting hardly seems good news. For example, if it was 9 percent last year and 8 percent the next and then 7-6-5-4-3-2-1, then the sum of those declining  rates is still 38 percent. Reports of declining rates are still symptomatic of a medium in decline.  

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