Cable TV, going the way of newspapers

[Commentary] Cable TV sellers will likely endure misery in the coming years similar to that visited upon US newspapers in the last few decades. In fact, the decline has already started, and to survive, cable providers are going to have to become much more nimble. Americans have been buying steadily fewer cable TV subscriptions over the past decade, according to figures from SNL Kagan. Numbers of cable TV subscriptions rose in the US every year from 1980 through 2001, but have since been on a slow slide. While the weak economy has led some American families to unplug their cable packages, a stronger underlying cause is the online accessibility of news and entertainment. It may take a few years for a crisis in cable TV sales to be widely appraised, but the medium is trending quite like US newspapers before that industry’s famine.

[Martin is the CLAS-Honors Preceptor of Journalism at the University of Maine and a columnist for Columbia Journalism Review]