My latest State of the Media Democracy B-Side covers an emotive and controversial issue – that of cord cutting. For those of you not familiar with the term, cord cutting refers to customers cancelling their pay-TV subscriptions and replacing them with free or paid-for on-demand services. As the chart below shows, the proportion of respondents subscribing to pay-TV services actually went up in all markets in 2011. This is despite the fact that in 2010 a relatively large number of respondents (about a quarter in France and Japan) said that they were intending to dispense with their subscriptions in favour of free or paid-for streamed alternatives. So why didn’t they? The answer is two-fold, I think. Firstly the number of people with the equipment to actually cut the cord is fairly limited as a proportion of the total. Most consumers with connected-ready TVs and Blu-ray players haven’t actually connected them because they lack the requisite (and expensive) Wi-fi dongle and the TV is too f...
Thoughts on strategy in a Digital Economy