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ESPN: Little Effort to Cut Cable

The New York Times, Monday, December 6, 2010 11:13 PM

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, to the question: 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. Offsetting those losses, though, 0.17 percent of households that had been broadcast-only signed up for pay TV and broadband. 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.

Read the whole story at The New York Times »

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