The Other Shoe Drops For Radio & Cable
Oct 9th, 2010 | By James Lewin | Category: General, Podcasting Research 
It looks like the other shoe has dropped for old media.
New research shows that people are abandoning old media by the millions for Internet media. And if they aren’t abandoning it, they are cutting way back on the time the spend with it.
First of all, there’s bad news for cable:
- In a survey of 2,500 consumers, 7 percent said they had stopped using basic cable service;
- 12 percent reported cutting their premium cable or satellite services.
- When asked about their expectations for next year, 21 percent of households in the under $50,000 bracket said they’d cancel their basic cable next year.
The trends are just as bad for radio:
- Young people have cut their radio use in half in the last decade. In 2000, 12-24 year olds spent an average of 2 hours and 43 minutes a day listening to radio. This has dropped to just 1 hour and 24 minutes.
- 3 times as many young people are listening to Pandora radio as listen to traditional radio broadcasts via the Internet.
- Young people spend twice as much time on the Internet now as they do listening to radio.
While these are positive trends for anyone interested in new media, numbers like these are going to mean even more disruption for traditional media.
What do you think? Are cable and radio’s days numbered?
Image: personne.de.chandigarh
The biggest things holding back new media are inertia and content deals that keep shows that people want to see unavailable on the Internet.
It’s sort of amazing, though, that young people have cut their radio listening in half already. I only listen in the car, and that’s because mobile wireless really isn’t there for cars yet. At least, not at a price I can afford!
I don’t think that people are abandoning cable just for online services, there’s this thing going on called a recession. It could turn into a depression! It is cheaper to get content online than it is to get it on TV. People have to cut back on professional content (only doing it for the money) and just watch amateur content (doing it for the love and not for the money). I do think that new media has played a role on the demise of old media, but there are other events going on.
It don’t even have cable anymore in my hometown. People gonna use internet instead to watch the TV or listen to the radio boardcast.
of all the media radio is the longest medium of them all, radio has been threatened by television, walkmans, mp3 players, ipods, internet radio, pandora radio, and it’s still here.
those are just numbers. and those numbers were directed towards who use the internet, there are large numbers of people out there who partly, mainly or most of the time rely on radio as a medium.
eripples – what part of young people cutting their radio listening in half don’t you understand?