Cable companies are scrambling as more viewers become cord-cutters

The cable TV industry is setting its sights on consumers who are shunning their business. Viewers who get their favorite shows for free by using over-the-air antennas have made "OTA" the buzzy acronym at the Internet & Television Expo being held in Chicago, where cable companies are gathered to mull over their fast-changing future. There are now more than 12.3 million homes that depend solely on over-the-air broadcasting for their live TV viewing, a net gain of 1 million over the last year, according to audience measurement service Nielsen.That's about 11 percent of all US households with TV -- hardly a mass migration to the old-school technology.

But as the cable and satellite industries see a downward trend in the overall number of customers signing up for their video offerings while broadband Internet service continues to grow, it's getting more attention. Some homes are turning to over-the-air signals because they can't afford cable. But a growing number of them are millennials who use over-the-air TV for live sports and broadcast network shows on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox while getting a wide array of programs from streaming video services such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. They are happy to pay for broadband Internet, but not TV. At the end of 2014, Nielsen put the number of broadband homes using over-the-air signals for TV at 6.1 million -- up from 5.6 million the previous year.