In survey after survey, cable TV providers are consistently listed among the most hated companies in America. Last month, Forbes reported that cable companies top the 2018 list of most hated industries. Industry leader Comcast is especially reviled, with damning coverage in 2018 (USA Today), 2017 (PC Magazine), 2016 (Ars Technica), 2015 (CNBC), and 2014 (Consumer Reports). I suspect I could go back further, but five years of being notorious proves the point.

Take a look at this public opinion data on the low regard the public has for these subscription companies:

(Source: Horowitz Research, via Statista)

While 91% of people who pay for Netflix say that the service is worth the money they spend, only 62% of cable subscribers say the same.

To which the good folks who run cable TV companies may be inclined to say, “So what?” For a very long time, cable companies have had monopolistic advantages that allowed them to ignore their bad reputations. But with the advent of streaming video over wide broadband channels, that is beginning to change. Take a look at how the biggest cable companies stack up against alternative providers:

(Source: Leichtman Research Group, via Statista)

While traditional cable companies remain the industry’s top service providers, there are now viable alternatives for many users. Moreover, an increasing number of former cable subscribers are choosing to abandon the bundled approach and instead subscribe to one or more other sources of video entertainment. These cord-cutters are growing in number. Here’s some hard data.

Pew research polled people who do not now subscribe to a cable TV service if they used to do so in the past:

(Source: Pew Research Center, via Statista)

Fully 62% of people who do not pay for cable did so in the past; 38% never did so. These cord-cutters and cord-nevers are the people who have rejected the traditional cable company value proposition. And they are growing in numbers over time.

(Source: PwC, via Statista)

From 2015 to 2017, cord nevers increased from 5% to 8%. That means new consumers coming into the market are opting out of cable. Cord-cutters have increased from 16% to 19%, as more customers simply opt out altogether. In fact, the slice of the pie that pay for traditional cable access dropped from 61% to 46% from 2015 to 2017.

In 2015, Forrester Research predicted that by 2025, the customer base for traditional cable would be 50%. According to PwC, we passed that milestone last year. Whatever the source of your data, the trend is downwards. Having treated customers poorly for many years in which there were no alternatives, cable companies have no customer loyalty to call upon now that some of their customers can flee. In the third quarter of 2018, over one million pay TV subscribers cut the cord, according to an article published this month in TechSpot. According to William Gayde, this is a record.

• Cord cutting has been on the rise as cable and traditional TV service providers scramble to appeal to a changing audience. Whatever they are doing isn’t quite working though. According to a new study by research firm MoffettNathanson, cable and satellite providers lost about 1.1 million customers from July to September of this year. This represents the largest quarterly loss ever for cable providers as well as the first time over 1 million people have cut the cord in a single quarter.

According to new research from Pew, about two-thirds of people obtain broadband Internet at home, and about 20% use their smartphone or wireless tablet for Internet broadband but NOT from an at-home service. And about 15% of people simply do not use any broadband Internet access service.

Jon Markman, writing for Forbes, says that this trend — mobile wireless only broadband — is growing.

• The big wireless companies are building better networks, with more bandwidth. The ultimate goal is to offer a product to compete directly with the wireline and cable TV industry. Current LTE networks are good enough right now to stream media effectively. Next generation 5G networks will offer speeds 100 times faster.

But many cord-cutters are still using cable-based Internet access. The trick here is that cable companies are not just TV service providers. They are also Internet service providers. So users who cancel their cable TV service may still be subscribing for Internet access. 

Those users who have cut the pay TV cord and still subscribe for Internet access are among those using the largest amounts of data, primarily because they are streaming video. To cable companies, these cable-cutters are sinners twice over: They cancel their TV service and then abuse their bandwidth to stream competing services’ video!

That is, to the cable companies, cord-cutters are the bandwidth hogs who abuse the system.

(Source: Sandvine, via Statista)

The top 15% of bandwidth users are using seven times the amount of data used by a typical subscriber. And cable companies, true to form, are digging deeper holes for themselves reputation-wise as they try to make cable-cutters pay their “fair share.”

Dell Cameron, writing in Gizmodo earlier this year, reports that in some markets Comcast has rolled out faster Internet for pay TV subscribers but not for cable-cutters (a charge that Comcast disputed). Cameron is a little biased:

• No one wants to pay for both cable and internet anymore. What’s more, no one, and I mean absolutely no one, wants to pay separate rental fees to put four cable TV boxes in their family’s home. What year is this? For cord-cutters who subscribe to Comcast, it’s apparently time to get screwed.

Jared Newman at TechHive details other nefarious ways cable companies are trying to retain power and subscribers. Once upon a time, consumer activists feared cable companies would push to end net neutrality and charge users more for some services than for others. Instead, providers have imposed data caps on the total amount of data you can stream, and then also offered their own streaming options that do not count against the cap.

Of course, since some subscribers — out of sheer nostalgia, even — really want to hold onto their cable service, cable providers can simply charge more. As WGRZ-TV reported late last month on CT-based cable company Spectrum, “Through rate increases, Spectrum boosts cable TV revenues even while losing customers.”

Rate hikes have been a staple response for cable companies for some time now, and users are fed up. According to research conducted by The Hollywood Reporter and released Oct. 30, most consumers think that cable TV costs too much:

• A whopping 90 percent of Americans say that the most important factor when deciding to subscribe to a TV or streaming service is cost. Meanwhile, 56 percent say cable is “unaffordable” and 47 percent say the same about satellite, while just 17 percent deem streaming unaffordable.

However, I submit that data caps, preferential offerings, and higher prices will not suffice in the long run to save the cable companies’ predatory business models. Of course, in the long run, the cable execs in charge will be retired and gone. There is still a lot of money to be flogged out of cable TV before the industry goes the way of the buggy-whip makers and the video-tape-rental shops.

Insider Take

Cable companies have managed to achieve a substantial subscription failure. They have alienated their customers and continue to engage in business practices designed to drive still more away. As it becomes more and more easy to leave these formerly monopolistic services, more and more subscribers will.