Americans Are Dumping Cable TV, but Execs Say Economics to Blame

Last quarter pay TV executives saw the day they hoped would never come: the first total decline in subscriptions since, well, the advent of cable.

But experts cautioned this isn't about "cord-cutting," or consumers opting out of cable TV for Hulu, Netflix and other online services. Rather, economic forces hit cable hard, including low housing formation, high unemployment rates and the lack of renewals for cheap contracts new customers signed last year during the digital-TV transition. The multichannel TV industry -- including cable, satellite and the telcos -- collectively lost 216,000 subscribers in the second quarter to the same period last year, declining to 100.1 million overall. That was driven by a steep 711,000 decline in cable TV alone, which more than offset subscriber gains for telcos such as Verizon Fios and satellite providers like DirecTV and Dish Network.