14 DAY TRIAL // One might have expected the advent of web-based multimedia to more sharply impact TV services, but it looks like the overall industry is still going strong, according to analysts.
Users have heard much about how the tablet segment has been threatening the overall notebook market.
By all accounts, the fact that slates began to eat away at the market share of notebooks less than a year after they first appeared is nothing to scoff at.
When it comes to the effect on the rest of the industry, and public perception, there might have been a more subtle influence.
Basically, many people may have come to expect other areas of the IT industry to experience similar decline as rival elements appear.
The pay-TV market in the US was among those that could have seen a decline during the earlier parts of the ongoing year (2011).
As it happens, however, even though the number of providers has fallen, revenue-generating units (RGU) actually saw a rise.
Granted, the number of US households with pay television fell by 370,000 in the second quarter (cable operators fared worst), but the total RGUs, individual service subscriber contracts, actually grew by 238,000.
“This seesaw pattern of quarterly growth and decline is indicative of a mature industry that has reached a high level of saturation, with subscription video services now being sold to some 85 percent of all U.S. homes,” said Erik Brannon, analyst for U.S. Cable Network Intelligence and U.S. TV Intelligence at IHS.
“Like any mature industry in a recession, the video side of the business is seeing some softness, but not the kind of steady or accelerating drops one would expect if—as some are suggesting—the American consumer is abandoning pay-TV en masse in favor of Internet-delivered video, a phenomenon known as ‘cord cutting.’ This indicates that the threat of cord-cutting has been overblown.”