Like many American households today, when my local cable TV
company first offered a generous incentive to sign up for a “triple play”
including cable television, home phone and high-speed Internet service, I was
eager to sign up.
At the time, the combination of bundling three
bills into one plus the added benefit of promotional discounts for the latest
technologies made the decision easy.
Today, however, a far different combination of seemingly
sneaky fees which continue to increase almost monthly, unreliable service
(including a voicemail service which recently erased all of my saved messages),
and more competition through emerging technologies is making it much easier to
ditch your local utility behemoth in favor of something else.
I’m certainly not alone in my frustration:
according to Qz.com, ten percent of pay TV
customers are planning to “cut the cord” in the year ahead -- although in a
previous poll last year, just 0.1 percent of the eight percent making similar
vows actually went through with it.
I imagine that the disconnect here between consumers’
intentions and actions is due to the assumed complexity of finding the right
replacement services, but what better time to show households just how to ditch
traditional pay TV and phone service providers than when they’re buying or
renting a new home?
Moreover, what better way to build your brand to tech-savvy
Millennials than to speak in a lexicon they already understand while also
showing them a way to save money well after they’ve moved into one of your
homes?
Then, a year down the line, when
their friends are complaining about the constant fee hikes to due to ‘higher
programming costs’ (especially for sports channels), they can brag about how
their builder or apartment management company made ‘cutting the cord’ so easy.
Today, however, most builders, apartment landlords and HOAs continue
to not only automatically refer their future residents to the local cable TV or
telephone companies, but in some cases actually benefit financially by locking
in their residents with ‘discounted’ yet mandatory service that can limit their
choices for years.
While such sweetheart deals might have made sense when these
triple-play services were first being rolled out, today these entrenched
players are often dealing with out-dated cable boxes or cheaply made cable
modems which assume the subscriber simply isn’t aware of competition from digital
TV antennas, satellite content providers, Internet-connected gadgets for home
phones or Internet companies like NetFlix, Amazon Video or Hulu which entertain
for a fraction of the cost.
In that
case, such pre-made agreements can start acting as a deterrent rather than an
amenity.
For now, both early adopting consumers as well as the
entrenched players are moving gradually beyond the status quo. In 2007, about two million households were
being tracked by Nielsen as ‘zero-TV’ homes, in which content was being
consumed on alternative devices such as laptops, pads and smart phones. By 2013, that total had more than doubled to
five million, with over two-thirds watching content on non-TV devices even when
three-quarters of them had a TV in the home.
Not surprisingly, while 36 percent cited cost as a factor
for their TV-free lifestyle, another 31 percent simply weren’t interested in
the content being offered on traditional networks, which underscores the
complaint that most pay TV subscribers are being forced to pay for content they
will never watch.
To keep subscribers from fleeing, pay TV companies are
beginning to offer ‘watch anywhere’ apps which allow viewers to view television
live or even set their DVRs so they don’t miss their favorite shows. Similarly, when HBO rolled out HBOGo, the
premium pay channel puts its entire library of original programming online to
subscribers for access on multiple devices including Internet-enabled TVs, DVD
players, smart phones and even gaming devices including the millions of Xbox
360 and PlayStation3 units sold over the past few years. By broadening the scope of where its content
can be seen, HBO can thus shift the balance of power back from distributor to
content provider in which the method of distribution becomes almost irrelevant.
So what just can builders and apartment managers do to
address this changing world?
Simply
providing information on the alternatives to the usual mainstays would be a
great start.
For example, many
companies provide Internet-based home phone service (also known as VOIP) for a
fraction of the cost charged by the usual suspects.
Plus, who wouldn’t want a free starter subscription
to NetFlix or Hulu Plus as part of the welcome package in a connected world?
