7 things I got wrong about cord-cutting

A little more than 10 years ago, I wrote my first weekly cord-cutting column here at TechHive.

It started with a declaration: We were on the cusp of a golden age for streaming and over-the-air TV, one that would lead to significant savings for consumers, new hardships for the TV industry, and lots of naysaying by clueless pundits who swore you’d be better off with cable. A lot of those predictions turned out to be right, and I hope some folks have saved money as a result.

But instead of just spiking the football after a decade of cord-cutting coverage, let’s review the tape on where I went wrong. TV’s evolution has been messy, and there were plenty of times that I missed an emerging trend or failed to recognize some new idea as a dead end. Some notable examples:

Linear TV didn’t collapse

With Netflix popularizing the idea of watching whatever you wanted on demand, I figured round-the-clock TV channels would eventually become obsolete for anything beyond news and sports. Why would anyone want to channel surf, I wondered, when a personalized algorithm could pick the perfect playlist for you instead?

It turns out people really like having linear channels, even just to throw on in the background while doing other things. Free streaming services such as Pluto TV and the Roku Channel—each of which offer hundreds of linear channels—have thrived in part by filling that void, and even paid services such as Disney+, Peacock, and The Criterion Channel have joined in on the trend.

DVR has endured

I also never expected DVR to have so much staying power in the streaming age. In a 2016 story equating live TV streaming services with the awkwardness of adolescence, I wrote that the DVR would “become obsolete as all episodes of a channel’s shows—past and current seasons—become available on demand.”

Eight years later, I still get emails from folks who worry that if they cut cable TV, they won’t be able to record their favorite shows (not true), or who want to record from on-demand services such as Netflix (not easy, but possible).

It’s the perfect example of an old habit dying hard. Folks who are accustomed to cable appreciate having a simple way to save shows for later, keep track of those shows in a centralized way, and ideally skip through commercials. That may explain why Sling TV and Philo have added DVRs to their free streaming services over the last year. DVR may fade away someday, but it’s not happening anytime soon.

Live TV price hikes haven’t relented

In hindsight, a story I wrote in 2019 about how “the worst may be over” for live TV streaming services now looks hopelessly naïve. Hulu + Live TV, for instance, was charging $45 per month for its live TV streaming service back then, and the price has nearly doubled to $83 per month now.

There’s still a price gap between these services and cable, but they all share the same underlying model, in which TV programmers demand increasing carriage fees for their full channel suites. While I’d hoped for a pivot to smaller, more flexible TV packages, most providers have gone the opposite way, extracting as much money as possible from a shrinking pay TV audience. Only now is the bill for that strategy finally coming due.

Streaming services got bigger, not smaller

One of the most interesting new streaming services to emerge in my early column-writing days was SeeSo, a $4-per-month offering from NBC that focused on comedy. It included NBC broadcast shows such as 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live, but also original series and a back catalog of syndicated programming. I thought it would represent a new wave of genre-based services that would complement larger ones such as Netflix.

What happened instead is that TV programmers developed a serious case of Netflix envy, believing they needed to bulk up to compete instead of niching down. SeeSo shut down in 2017, and NBC launched the more expansive Peacock a few years later. (As with most other Netflix-likes, Peacock remains unprofitable.) Niche services do exist—there’s Shudder for horror, Britbox for British TV, and CuriosityStream for documentaries, among others—but it’s not the major TV programmers offering them.

Gambling hasn’t subsidized sports streaming

When Fubo started making noise about integrating a sportsbook with its live TV streaming service a few years ago, I floated a theory that such integrations—and their resulting profits—would help offset the rising cost of sports programming.

I’m embarrassed to look back on that take now, and not just because it didn’t pan out. (Fubo wound up scrapping its sportsbook plans in 2022.) Studies have also shown legalized sports betting in the United States to be financially ruinous for bettors, making them a weird thing to cheer for as a potential source of TV savings.

Ad-supported streaming is the norm now

In a 2016 story about the annoyance of repetitive ads on streaming services, I suggested that ad-free TV was becoming standard thanks to services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and HBO Now. “Services that don’t bother to make commercial breaks tolerable—or, dare I say, enjoyable—might ultimately find that they have no impressions left to give,” I wrote.

We all know what happened next. The streamers realized that cheaper ad-supported tiers are more effective at getting people in the door, and they’re also highly profitable, so they can charge even more for ad-free streaming. Netflix and Max (HBO Now’s successor) both offer ad-supported tiers now, and Amazon switched on ads by default for Prime subscribers, requiring a $3-per-month surcharge to avoid them. In the shift from cable to streaming, I should have known that a major source of TV revenue would not simply vanish.

Streaming platforms haven’t revolutionized the TV bundle

Going back to 2016, I posited that Roku, Fire TV, and other streaming platforms would start bundling streaming services together. Amazon already offered a subscription marketplace called Prime Video Channels, and I figured the scale of these platforms would allow them to create compelling new TV packages for cord-cutters.

Eight years later, we’re still talking about the “Great Re-bundling” as something that may eventually happen, but it’s not the big streaming platforms spearheading it. Instead, we’re seeing cable companies, wireless providers, and streaming services themselves finding ways to create discounted subscription packages. The big streaming platforms, meanwhile, have merely cloned Amazon’s marketplace, with a limited selection of subscriptions and no discounts for tying them together.

Whether you’ve been reading my column for a decade or are just discovering it now, thanks so much for following along! Sign up for my Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter to keep up with new columns and get more streaming insights every Friday.