ESPN Study Concludes Little Cord-Cutting

by Wayne Friedman , March 14, 2011

Cord-cutting

TV cable cord-cutting? One of the biggest cable networks says it's a small, almost microscopic amount -- and shrinking in number.

ESPN says just 0.18% of all U.S. TV households cut their cable service in the fourth quarter of 2010 and first quarter of 2011. That comes to roughly 209,000 TV homes out of an entire 116 million U.S. TV universe, according to Nielsen.

ESPN says these numbers continue to drop. In the third quarter of 2010, the number was 0.28%, or roughly 325,000 homes.

Even then, the big cable sports network says the small amount of cord-cutting was offset by non-cable TV homes becoming cable-TV homes during the period. This group also represented 0.18% of TV homes, or 209,000. "So the net loss between the groups was zero," according to the study.

"We continue to see minuscule amounts of cord-cutting among U.S. households," stated Glenn Enoch, vice president of Integrated Media Research of ESPN. "Rather than disturbing the existing avenues of distribution, the continued growth of broadband penetration and use of online video provides a tremendous opportunity for growth in media consumption across all platforms."

Good news for heavy-watching TV networks: the study shows that the majority of those cord-cutters -- 71% -- were non- or light TV/video watchers. For its genre, ESPN says its viewers are heavy TV sports viewing consumers, amounting to 87% of the network's viewers.

Sports viewers, according to ESPN's research, are usually heavy TV sports watchers overall -- totaling 77% of all sports TV viewing.

television, trends, tv

3 comments about "ESPN Study Concludes Little Cord-Cutting".

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Jim Reinl from Woodward Communications, March 15, 2011 at 8:57 a.m.
FYI...you're cutting a power cord, not a cable cord, which is not only poor editing, but very dangerous!
Reply

Doug Garnett from Protonik, LLC, March 15, 2011 at 12:48 p.m.

Interesting. Great to see someone clearly note that there's always been an ebb and flow of cable subscribers at the fringe - among the households who watch the lowest amount of TV. (I have a mid-life family member who just signed up for cable for the first time in their lives.)

That flavor of cable cutting isn't anything new. That seems to be lost amidst the hype surrounding new TV options.

Mark Myslinski from OpenVideo Consulting, March 15, 2011 at 5:34 p.m.

Analysts need to get unfocused from cord-cutting and start to really focus on cable-trimming.

It's clear the television/video community wants a component of their viewing to be web conetnt, and they are starting to figure out ways to trim their pay-tv bill and use it for access to web content.

Over time, the pay-tv subscriber base will be doing substantial pay-tv trimming and taking a portion fo their pay-tv monthly outlay to access to web content. This is inevitable.

Although, we don't yet see a pay-tv model that is based on CDN/OTT delivery, there are volumes of web content, and much more coming that is made-for-tv content that will be low-cost/no-cost and will certainly eat into the pay-tv revenues.

Wake up people!