ESPN Says Study Shows Little Effort to Cut Cable

By BRIAN STELTER

Published: December 5, 2010 nyt

Seeking to understand the cutting of cable cords, ESPN has waded into the Nielsen Company’s audience sample and concluded that the cancellations are currently a “very minor” phenomenon.

The sports network’s study provides a new answer, or at least a new set of data, for a question that looms over the television industry: how many Americans are dropping their costly cable subscriptions and watching TV on the Internet instead?

This action, often called cord-cutting, has happened in 0.28 percent of households in the United States in the last three months, ESPN found in a study that it plans to release on Monday. Offsetting those losses, though, 0.17 percent of households that had been broadcast-only signed up for pay TV and broadband.

“So the net amount of cord-cutting for one quarter was just one-tenth of 1 percent,” said Glenn Enoch, the vice president for integrated media research for ESPN.

The study is significant because the prospect of cord-cutting has deeply worried television executives. Established players like ESPN that depend on subscriber revenue have been eager to figure out how much cord-cutting is going on — and to dispel myths about the behavior.

“We got a little worn out reading headline after headline saying, ‘Cord-cutting, it’s a disaster; young people are abandoning TV.’ For our strategic purposes, we needed to know what was really going on,” Mr. Enoch said.

The research comes from the same sample that Nielsen uses to project TV ratings. Nielsen verified ESPN’s findings.

Similarly, data from the research firm SNL Kagan found that 119,000 customers dropped their cable or satellite subscriptions in the third quarter of this year. There are about 100 million subscriptions nationwide.

Pat McDonough, the senior vice president for planning, policy and analysis at Nielsen, said the ESPN study confirmed that while there are some cord-cutters, “it’s a really small number of people.”

More people, she added, are “swapping cable cords, rather than cutting them.” Cable providers have lost some customers to satellite or telecommunications providers in recent years.

Mr. Enoch said ESPN would monitor cord-cutting behavior every three months using the Nielsen sample. The amount of cord-cutting could pick up over time, but networks like ESPN are limiting the amount of video they make available on the Internet without a subscription partly to prevent that.

Sporting events are particularly hard to watch free online, so it comes as little surprise that the Nielsen sample found that among heavy and medium viewers of sports, the research showed what Mr. Enoch called “zero cord-cutting.”

A version of this article appeared in print on December 6, 2010, on page B7 of the New York edition.

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Only 0.1% Have Cut The Cord: ESPN Analysis

Analysis Of Nielsen Data Indicates 0.3% Of Broadcast-Only Subs Became Multichannel, Broadband Subs Over Past Three Months

Mike Reynolds -- Multichannel News, 12/6/2010 9:40:26 AM



Cord-cutting, at this point, is barely a blip on the multichannel horizon.
According to an ESPN analysis of Nielsen's national people meter sample over the past three months, just 0.28% of homes dropped their multichannel video service, but maintained their broadband connections.
That percentage was mitigated by a group of broadcast-only households that became subscribers to multichannel TV and broadband over the same period, as these "un-cutters" represented 0.17% of homes in the Nielsen sample.
As such, the net loss between the groups was just 0.11% of all households.

Additionally, people who were heavy or medium sports viewers showed zero cord-cutting. Heavy and medium sports viewers account for 83% of sports viewing and 90% of viewing to ESPN, according to the programmer.
"This project adds critical intelligence to our understanding of the multichannel marketplace," said Glenn Enoch, vice president of Integrated Media Research, ESPN, in a statement. "We knew from other sources that cord cutting was a very minor behavior, but we now have the ability to quantify this group and monitor it in the future."

Miscellaneous thoughts:

- First, a caveat: Don't confuse yourself with the target demographic. That being said, most of the sports I care about aren't carried by ESPN, and aren't carried live by anyone in the US. Many of them are not available from any US television provider at any time. Torrents are my friend for the European stuff. The American stuff (which is non-NASCAR racing), is sometimes carried in an abbreviated format at 3 AM on a Tuesday three months after the event. So ESPN's advantage, "People will subscribe to a pay TV service to get live sports", doesn't apply to me. It also doesn't apply to people who don't give a crap about watching overpaid grown men play children's games.

- ESPN thinks that by keeping live sports off the interweb, they will keep people inside the pay TV walled garden. That sentiment implies they are the ones who make that choice. Umm, they're not at the start of the value chain, except for their newscasts and the like. There is typically a league that has ultimate control.

- A friend, who *is* in the target demographic for the pay TV value, chain swears by mlb.com for the ipad. Due to blackouts, he can't get everything he wants to see. He needs to pull down the local terrestrial TV signal to watch local games. But, as a transplant, much of what he cares about isn't covered by the local blackout. A small slice of what he cares about is exclusively on traditional pay TV. Armor meet chink.

- mark 12-06-2010 9:11 pm

I think it's hilarious that they already have a name for this phenomenon that has them so unconcerned!
- tom moody 12-07-2010 12:19 pm