Whatever happened to the cable TV revolution?

In the follow-up to the recent defeat of Aereo by the US Supreme Court wehere broadcasters successfully argued that Aereo engaged in unauthorized exploitation of their content, headlines about rampant cord-cutting are not backed up by the data, says Dan Rayburn, a principal analyst with Frost & Sullivan.

“Are cable companies still having record profits? Yes. The industry has not lost more than 1% in any one quarter. People are saying cable is dead and broadcast is dead.” Online services, he says, are a complement -- not a disrupter -- to cable. US pay-TV subscribers -- cable, satellite and Internet protocol TV -- rose by 202,670 during the first quarter, although cable subscribers alone in the US fell by 132,330, according to recent analysis by global information company IHS Technology.

The bigger cable players have been showing more resilience. But some see television and other content providers slowly merging.

“There’s the old Trojan Horse argument,” says Aram Sinnreich, media professor at Rutgers University. “Movies and TV are the lures, but eventually the television itself will just become equally important for entertainment, gaming, communications.”

That’s not to say that financially-strapped Americans are not exasperated. Cable bills have more than doubled over the last decade and the national average bill -- currently around $90 a month -- will reach $200 in 2020, estimates market researcher The NPD Group. Indeed, 2.7% of pay-TV customers say they’re thinking about cutting the cord in 2015, according to a 2013 survey by research firm Magid Advisors, up from 2.2% the year before and 1.9% in 2011.

But Rayburn says what people say in surveys and what they actually do in real life are very different: “If you want to ask anyone if they want to stop paying for something, what do you think they’re going to say?”