More Evidence of a Sea Change

So if you have spent any time with me you will know that I believe that the way in which we 'watch TV' is changing.  What I mean is that how it is distributed and how we get it is changing and that has some real ramifications for those that depend on TV as an advertising medium.  I have written a few posts about this here  and here. This week there are three news stories that seem to support the idea that people are starting to 'cut the cord' or at least seriously consider it.  Gigaom has a series on the topic.

The first story is a report from Sandvine that states that 20% of all primetime downstream bandwidth (in the US?) is streaming video from Netflix.  Let's say that again for effect.  Primetime, 20% of downstream or download bandwidth is Netflix streaming movies to people who are watching movies and TV commercial free.  hmm.

Next, is a Gigaom report from MSFT that their Xbox live service has more subscribers than Comcast.  Now XBox Live is global and it is primarily a live game playing platform so at a glance this may not be that impressive.  But a few other data points brings the threat to cable in sharper focus.  Xbox live subscribers spend an average of 40 hours a week on the service and are increasingly downloading TV and Movie content through live via services such as Netflix, ESPN2 and Hulu.  The amount of time that users are watching TV and Movie content has grown 157%.  But so what, that doesn't mean that people are going to cancel their cable service.

Well maybe, maybe not.  Comcast has just reported in their latest earnings report that they lost 275,000 subscribers.  There are some who wrote this off to the economy but a report from strategy analytics tells a slightly different story.  The report is here and there is an on going thread over at gigaom on the topic here but the bottom line is that 'cord cutters' are young, educated, employed and cutting the cord because they can get the content they want in other ways while saving money and saying goodbye to their cable companies.

This may be the early stages of an interesting sea change in how we get to consume our favorite media.  stay tuned.