ESPN Says Study Shows Little Effort to Cut Cable

Seeking to understand the cutting of cable cords, ESPN has waded into the Nielsen Company’s audience sample and concluded that the cancellations are currently a “very minor” phenomenon.

The sports network’s study provides a new answer, or at least a new set of data, for a question that looms over the television industry: how many Americans are dropping their costly cable subscriptions and watching TV on the Internet instead? This action, often called cord-cutting, has happened in 0.28 percent of households in the United States in the last three months, ESPN found in a study that it plans to release on Monday. Offsetting those losses, though, 0.17 percent of households that had been broadcast-only signed up for pay TV and broadband. “So the net amount of cord-cutting for one quarter was just one-tenth of 1 percent,” said Glenn Enoch, the vice president for integrated media research for ESPN. The study is significant because the prospect of cord-cutting has deeply worried television executives. Established players like ESPN that depend on subscriber revenue have been eager to figure out how much cord-cutting is going on — and to dispel myths about the behavior.