By 2018 Over 21% of People Won’t Pay for Cable

Comcast has explicitly said they believe cord cutting to be media hype.

But it’s hard to argue with data. A recent study by eMarketer and reported by the Wall Street Journal found that by 2018 (only two years from now, mind you), we’ll see less than 80% of households with traditional cable packages.

Not only this, but the rate at which people cancel their cable is accelerating. A graph published by the WSJ shows the rate at which people are subscribing to cable, note the dip into the negatives since 2014.

This doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise, as both more people turn to alternatives such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime, but also comes largely as a younger generation moves out of their parents’ houses and never subscribe to cable themselves. The term ‘cord nevers’ has started to appear, representing people who never have had their name on a cable company invoice.

Now what the data doesn’t account for is how many of these younger potential subscribers still use their parents’ logins for their entertainment. What happens when this free pass disappears? Our guess? By that point the landscape for television consumption will likely be so different from what we recognize today that these younger audiences will likely never subscribe to what we think of as cable today. Instead, it will likely be purely digital bundles through internet connections. The concept of cable seems primed to go the way of the phone landline.