North American consumer research shows that more than 2 million households in the United States will cut their cable and satellite TV subscriptions in favor of online TV platforms by the end of this year. The news gets worse – lost consumers aren’t being replaced either. About 300,000 TV subscribers were added in the United States in 2010, a significant decrease from the 1.8 million subscribers the industry added in 2009, and while things are looking slightly better in 2011 with 630,000 TV subscriber additions expected for the year, analysts have no idea how to project how many existing customers will jump ship.
    When the broadcast industry plays the blame game, you’ll find most fingers pointed at Hulu and YouTube, which have been distributing free video content for years. Some may even point at Netflix, who charges a small monthly fee to access a huge database of streaming movies – most of them now in HD. The grouchiest fingers could even be pointed at the millennials – a generation of spoiled digital native consumers who should start supporting the services they enjoy by paying for them.
    Hopefully, some of those fingers are pointing right back at the broadcast sector, which raised that generation of spoiled consumers by ignoring them. I think back to the barely attended digital natives panel session at the SATELLITE 2009 conference in Washington D.C. I sat in a room with five other people, listening to a group of very concerned panelists plead with broadcasters to adjust their business models and create offerings that younger consumers would pay for. Instead of forming brainstorming sessions and thinking outside of the box to solve these issues, the broadcasting sector focused on high-end, frontier 3-D and HD services requiring hardware that nobody could afford in a slow economy.
    As the saying goes, “it’s better late than never,” and I’ve noticed a lot more attention paid to the reality of the broadcast consumer market. Satellite broadcasting models have especially matured, leveraging the most important physical advantage of the platform – mobility. On behalf of the tail-end of Generation X, I can say with confidence that most people my age would pay about 25 to 30 dollars to access high-speed Internet and video on a long flight.