Cord cutters say they are saving an average of $115 per month, according to a new survey, which also found that within five years more than half of current cable customers doubt they’ll still subscribe to traditional pay TV.
At a time when pay-TV subscribers are eroding, the poll, conducted by personal finance website LendEdu, indicates things may not be getting any easier for the traditional TV business.
In the poll, 58% of cord-cutters said they cut the cord because their TV cable subscription was too expensive, 21.2% said they used their cable subscription less because of streaming services and 11.8% said their cable subscription didn’t provide the content they wanted.
The survey puts the average cost of traditional pay TV services at $116.93 per month.
A smaller number of cord cutters, 4%, said they resented the “greed” of cable companies.
The vast majority of cord cutters, 71.6% said they used streaming services before dropping cable. The average cord cutter in the survey had 2.77 streaming subscriptions before cancelling traditional pay TV.
The cord cutters said they paid $33.74 per month on streaming before cutting the cord.
After cutting the cord, they spent $35.33 on streaming services.
On top of that, 34.4% of cord cutters said they also used online subscriptions that weren’t theirs and that they didn’t pay for. That password sharing was saving them about $51.38 per month.
Of those subscribing to pay-TV, 79.8% said they subscribed to at least one streaming service. They subscribed to an average of 2.5 streaming services and paid $30.87 per month for those subscriptions.
Only 52.13% of cable subscribers said they used cable more than streaming services.
When asked if they would consider cutting the cord, 65% said yes, with most of them saying they would be driven to that by increases in the price of cable subscriptions.
Asked about their future as cable subscribers, 31% said they didn’t think they would be using cable in one year, 49.6% said they didn’t think they’d be using cable in three years, and in five years, 56% said no.
The biggest attraction for subscribing to cable was the ability to channel surf, cited by 42.6% of respondents, followed by “not having to depend on my WiFi connection (35.2%), live sports, (11.8%) and live news (10.4%).
The poll was conducted online for LendEdu by Pollfish, which surveyed 500 cord cutters and 500 cable subscribers. The polls were taken over four days beginning Dec. 28, 2017.
