Because the rest of us have already made our decision and are moving on. Sure, some of us Gen-Xers have already tried the alternatives, including piling the family around the laptop for an evening of “The A-Team” re-runs on Hulu and weaning ourselves from the linear television schedule in favor of what we could find on Netflix’s streaming service.
If you’re interested in yoga, I highly recommend the new digital broadcast channels we have here in the U.S. — because whatever you do in that regard leads to some form of yoga. First, there’s the constant, slow positioning movement that digital television antennas require as a weather system moves through your area and the signal shifts around your living room. Though some might, and with good reason, compare that to a form of (post-) modern dance. Second, if you go for the highly-attractive outdoor antenna, you run the (very likely, in my book) risk of falling off of a ladder, necessitating physical therapy that could very well end up in yoga. And finally, there’s the activity you end up doing with the empty space in front of your television set when your channel search results in yet-another-no-channels-found evening.
But back to the millenials, because they’re the ones who (at least in the media) are talking about not subscribing to PayTV services. Of course, it’s August, and the New York Times suddenly cares about all sorts of things that seem to be more closely aligned with the concept of a “working vacation,” and the editors look the other way as reporters crank out this drivel:
It is a fantasy shared by many Americans: dropping cable television and its fat monthly bills and turning instead to the wide-open frontier of Internet video.
Some are finding that the reality is not that simple.
Just ask Bill Mitchell, a 40-year-old engineer in Winston-Salem, N.C. He canceled his Time Warner cable service and connected his flat-panel television to the Internet to watch sitcoms and his other favorite shows, using products from Apple and Boxee.
His experiment lasted 12 months. Recently, grudgingly, he returned to his $130-a-month cable subscription, partly because his family wanted programming that was not available online.
“The problem is, we’re hooked on shows on HBO and Showtime, like ‘True Blood’ and ‘Dexter,’ ” he said, adding that he wishes he could buy only the shows he wants instead of big bundles of channels he doesn’t. “It’s so frustrating.”
In elementary school, we had a simple rejoinder for this sort of statement.
Duh!
Yes, it’s frustrating that we can’t watch “Dexter” for free without having to subscribe to cable. And while we’re at it. Yes, it’s frustrating that my beloved half gallon of ice cream has been replaced by the ever more convenient (and smaller) 1.75 quart size. But that’s life in a world that’s marketed and segmented to death.
As for the PayTV bundle, there are teams of people; at companies such as: AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox Communications, DIRECTV, DiSH, Time Warner Cable and Verizon; whose job it is to figure out our precise point of pain. These people calculate precisely how much we’re willing to pay for our PayTV bundles, for the triple play, and so on.
This is a reality of modern business. That move to a 1.75 quart ice cream container, a marketing person, brand manager, or category manager at a food company probably figured out that people have a certain willingness to pay for a carton of ice cream. They looked at the fact that (in order to maintain margins in light of slow, but steady inflation), a half a gallon of Breyer’s ice cream would have to cost over a magical number, let’s say five or six bucks, depending on where you live. A smaller container kept the “carton” within the price point and the margins intact (or possibly improved them…at least for the short term).
The mistake the reporters in the millenial generation are making isn’t new. We Gen-Xers got all hot and bothered about the idea that we didn’t need to be marketed to. During dotcom, we were thinking that we could simply go online and find what we wanted, eliminating the need for the proverbial “middle man” and arcane concepts such as “brick and mortar.” Of course, these days, the Internet is teeming with marketers; Google is a household name because of Internet advertising; and many of us go to those brick-and-mortar stores to see the things we ultimately buy online.
The true error is writing to a meme — accepting as fact that which is simply anecdotal.
It is a fantasy shared by many Americans: dropping cable television and its fat monthly bills and turning instead to the wide-open frontier of Internet video.
As an industry analyst and market researcher, the first question that comes to mind is how many Americans share this fantasy? Perhaps this is just a lede, but let’s be honest. Are we talking about 5% of the population or something closer to half?
The frustrating thing is that there is plenty of research in the marketplace about this very issue. How are PayTV subscriptions faring in this miserable economy? Are people watching more (or less) television? And the real questions — what are the demographics of the Millenial generation? Have they begun to subscribe to PayTV? How does this compare to other generations? And how will this change over time?
Because we’re all waiting for the children of the baby boomers to come online and start helping us pay for our beloved television.