• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, July 3, 2019

Where are the next generation of pay TV cord-cutters coming from? Hints could be found in monitoring mobile video behavior, according to one report.

Parks Associates says some U.S. broadband households are highly likely to cut the cord in the next 12 months -- especially those watching more than six hours of video content on their mobile phone a week. This compares to two-and-a-half hours among all U.S. broadband households.

What does this amount to? Parks says roughly 10% of broadband subscribers are probable cord-cutters, with half of those highly likely to make the change in the next 12 months.

This further complicates the issue over the 75% or so of U.S. TV consumers who still get their TV networks via traditional pay TV services, a business continuing to see steady loss of consumers.

That difference might mean those specific consumers are more comfortable making big jumps to new tech platforms. They might have less concerns about potential technical issues on digital video platforms than mainstream TV consumers.

What will make new consumers take the leap?

Perhaps the advent of new delivery technology -- like 5G broadband services, which might cure “latency” video issues, as well as helping to minimize outages.

Some of those outages might be top of mind for consumers mulling the idea of cutting the cord.

Just look at the recent snafus: A highly publicized Hulu outage occurred during the recent 2020 Democratic Presidential Debate live event. In February, CBS Sports app and CBS All Access (via Roku set top boxes in some cases) had outages when it came to its transmission of the Super Bowl.

Live TV events are key. Parks identifies those high-end mobile video users as being particularly comfortable with the most valued of all TV programming genres -- live video. 

If live streaming becomes virtually error-free (and hack-free?), will that increase the slow cord-cutting leak to a fast flow?