By your definition, yeah, there are no cable-cutters. But in contemporary America, "cable-cutter" means someone who ditched the cable TV package and watches free over-the-air video via antenna and supplements it via the remaining high-speed Internet connection with Netflix. We've been doing it for about a year. I was concerned because we live over 50 miles from the nearest ABC affiliate, that we wouldn't get ABC shows. Our $110 antenna in the attic not only gets ABC programming, the picture is better now. We whacked our bill from over $170 a month to $62.99 including taxes and Netflix. It's a beautiful thing.
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Wrong. "Cutting the Cable" means limiting yourself to only what comes in free over an antenna. Anything more to supplement it means you haven't "cut the cable". You could almost make a case that renting videos at Redbox means you haven't "cut the cable".
Unless your monthly bill is $0, not counting initial investment in an antenna, you have not cut the cable.
As Springsteen sung "57 channels and nuthin on!"
But now it's more like 500 channels and nothing on.
I have Netflix and Roku and still feel that way sometimes!!!
Fixed.
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FredLeonard
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You could also make the case that there is no "free TV." You need an antenna, maybe a roof antenna (plus installation). You need a digital TV or at least a converter plus your old analog TV. Is easy to go into four figures on equipment. And then you either have to watch the commercials (how much is your time worth?) or buy a Tivo (no cable company DVR for cord cutters). No free lunch; no free TV.
"Cut the cord" is pretty commonly used to mean they're not tied to the cable company and its packages for television. That could include over-the-air broadcast, Netflix, Hulu, a box such as Roku and even Aereo when it was available. Watching free over-the-air TV would certainly qualify. Maybe that's X-TREME cord cutting.
Here's one example.
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Aereo-ruling-leaves-cord-cutters-with-options-5587096.php
Here's one example.
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Aereo-ruling-leaves-cord-cutters-with-options-5587096.php
"Cutting the cord," taken to the extreme, could mean living like the Amish!
"Cord-cutting" was a term developed to reflect a certain optimism among supporters of broadcast television that the proliferation of options digital opened up to over-the-air, coupled with the other effects of the digital transition that would eliminate most of the bad old things people associated with watching on an antenna, would bring a substantial number of people back to broadcast television and make broadcasting relevant again as more than just a source of programming for cable operators, especially as cable prices continued to rise. It was always sort of a naive view that ignored how much cable had evolved since the 90s, and didn't pay enough attention to other developments in the 00s that would make things much harder for them, but the main point is, the Internet wasn't really part of the picture at all. YouTube was still in its infancy, and Netflix was still a DVD delivery service.
What the term "cord-cutting" is now used as a shorthand for is a significantly broader movement, one that holds that one's consumption of entertainment should not be tied to an arbitrary spot on a linear television schedule or a big, fixed device at home clamped to the wall. It is more about a lack of dependence on the cable operators than an outright rejection of them; in fact the "TV Everywhere" schemes that have cropped up in recent years are, in theory, entirely in keeping with this idea. As a result, even as "cord-cutting" has gotten more and more press, it has been almost entirely focused on the effect of the Internet, with hooking up an antenna to watch broadcast TV reduced to a secondary role at best. A typical "cord-cutter" today will say: "Yeah, I cut the cord, told Comcast to drop my TV and just give me Internet. Now I subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, get some stuff off YouTube, oh, and I have an antenna on the roof as well on those occasions I want to watch CBS."
This explains why Nielsen broadened its definition of TV households a year or so ago to include people who got all their video over the Internet and not via conventional TV, even over-the-air. It also explains why one "cord-cutting" podcast I watch repeatedly reacted to the broadcasters' threats to pull their good programming off the free airwaves if they lost the Aereo case with borderline glee at accelerating the demise of broadcast television and the freeing up of its spectrum for delivery of the Internet. If you had told a proponent of cord-cutting five years ago that there would come a day when people professing to support cord-cutting would be celebrating the demise of broadcast television - even as they benefitted from it - they wouldn't be able to process it.
By the time all this became apparent, it was too late for broadcast to benefit as much as its proponents thought it would; a lot of the programming people actually wanted to watch had by now moved exclusively to cable channels. Broadcasting turned out to have two big disadvantages that more channels alone couldn't solve (besides digital turning out to make marginal signals nonexistent for many): overreaching nanny-state regulations on content cable channels weren't subject to, and cable networks' ability to collect subscription fees from cable companies on top of advertising revenue.
Both of these have become fairly broadly recognized, but the latter only dimly so outside the industry (most of the laymen to be aware of it I've seen are more interested in the sports business than the TV business), and broadcasters' response to it - to belatedly embrace retransmission consent as a way to make up the balance - ended up resulting in the absurdity of the Aereo case where broadcasters were effectively arguing against their own method of distribution and threatened to walk away from it if a business claiming to make it better was allowed to prosper. Given all this, it should be no surprise that multicasting has fallen far short of its potential and has done little more than populate the airwaves with one cheap rerun farm after another.
The Aereo case did reflect reality in one sense: the emphasis on the Internet in "cord-cutting" means that broadcast and cable providers do find themselves on the same side in having to defend the existence of linear television at all. The masses of channels broadcasters so desperately wanted to compete with now appear to have badly oversaturated the market. Broadcasters also find themselves having to defend the technology of broadcasting as a viable delivery method separate from the Internet.
If they can do this, they might actually be in better shape in the long term than cable networks, but they would have to depend on the Internet for delivery as little as possible, as much as I supported Aereo; if the only method you have for people to watch your live feed on smartphones and tablets is over the Internet, you're not only abandoning the point of broadcasting over-the-air instead of just being an Internet service, you're just shifting what spectrum is carrying it, sending the same program over two different pieces of spectrum, and unnecessarily putting more strain on one of those two pieces that could be better served doing something else. ATSC M/H isn't the answer; besides being an add-on kludge that has few devices natively supporting it and no one using it, the fact that it's optional on the broadcaster end will be its undoing, since it gives the likes of an ABC no reason not to just shack up with the cable companies to make a TV Everywhere app instead. Even if they manage to defend both linear television and broadcasting as the method of delivering it, its role will be so different that there will be people wondering whether letting today's broadcasters be tomorrow's as well amounts to a windfall for incumbent interests.
What the term "cord-cutting" is now used as a shorthand for is a significantly broader movement, one that holds that one's consumption of entertainment should not be tied to an arbitrary spot on a linear television schedule or a big, fixed device at home clamped to the wall. It is more about a lack of dependence on the cable operators than an outright rejection of them; in fact the "TV Everywhere" schemes that have cropped up in recent years are, in theory, entirely in keeping with this idea. As a result, even as "cord-cutting" has gotten more and more press, it has been almost entirely focused on the effect of the Internet, with hooking up an antenna to watch broadcast TV reduced to a secondary role at best. A typical "cord-cutter" today will say: "Yeah, I cut the cord, told Comcast to drop my TV and just give me Internet. Now I subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, get some stuff off YouTube, oh, and I have an antenna on the roof as well on those occasions I want to watch CBS."
This explains why Nielsen broadened its definition of TV households a year or so ago to include people who got all their video over the Internet and not via conventional TV, even over-the-air. It also explains why one "cord-cutting" podcast I watch repeatedly reacted to the broadcasters' threats to pull their good programming off the free airwaves if they lost the Aereo case with borderline glee at accelerating the demise of broadcast television and the freeing up of its spectrum for delivery of the Internet. If you had told a proponent of cord-cutting five years ago that there would come a day when people professing to support cord-cutting would be celebrating the demise of broadcast television - even as they benefitted from it - they wouldn't be able to process it.
By the time all this became apparent, it was too late for broadcast to benefit as much as its proponents thought it would; a lot of the programming people actually wanted to watch had by now moved exclusively to cable channels. Broadcasting turned out to have two big disadvantages that more channels alone couldn't solve (besides digital turning out to make marginal signals nonexistent for many): overreaching nanny-state regulations on content cable channels weren't subject to, and cable networks' ability to collect subscription fees from cable companies on top of advertising revenue.
Both of these have become fairly broadly recognized, but the latter only dimly so outside the industry (most of the laymen to be aware of it I've seen are more interested in the sports business than the TV business), and broadcasters' response to it - to belatedly embrace retransmission consent as a way to make up the balance - ended up resulting in the absurdity of the Aereo case where broadcasters were effectively arguing against their own method of distribution and threatened to walk away from it if a business claiming to make it better was allowed to prosper. Given all this, it should be no surprise that multicasting has fallen far short of its potential and has done little more than populate the airwaves with one cheap rerun farm after another.
The Aereo case did reflect reality in one sense: the emphasis on the Internet in "cord-cutting" means that broadcast and cable providers do find themselves on the same side in having to defend the existence of linear television at all. The masses of channels broadcasters so desperately wanted to compete with now appear to have badly oversaturated the market. Broadcasters also find themselves having to defend the technology of broadcasting as a viable delivery method separate from the Internet.
If they can do this, they might actually be in better shape in the long term than cable networks, but they would have to depend on the Internet for delivery as little as possible, as much as I supported Aereo; if the only method you have for people to watch your live feed on smartphones and tablets is over the Internet, you're not only abandoning the point of broadcasting over-the-air instead of just being an Internet service, you're just shifting what spectrum is carrying it, sending the same program over two different pieces of spectrum, and unnecessarily putting more strain on one of those two pieces that could be better served doing something else. ATSC M/H isn't the answer; besides being an add-on kludge that has few devices natively supporting it and no one using it, the fact that it's optional on the broadcaster end will be its undoing, since it gives the likes of an ABC no reason not to just shack up with the cable companies to make a TV Everywhere app instead. Even if they manage to defend both linear television and broadcasting as the method of delivering it, its role will be so different that there will be people wondering whether letting today's broadcasters be tomorrow's as well amounts to a windfall for incumbent interests.
Exactly. Oh, you have electricity? Sorry, you're not a cord cutter.
I stand corrected!!!
If I drop the satellite radio in my car does that count? I already use my MP3 player more than the radio, but then I had to download the music and shows I listen to!
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