Almighty Giz has two exciting maps that offer an alternative explanation for the decline in cable and satellite subscriptions in the past year. If you look at the maps, you’ll find that the areas that saw the biggest drops in subscriptions are also, generally, the areas hardest hit by foreclosures. The theory goes, these areas have been hard hit by the recession, and subsequent unemployment, so they’d be first to drop superfluous things like $100+ cable TV bills.
Then again, I’ve always heard that in tough economic times the one thing people are likely to keep is, in fact, their TV. They may no longer out to eat at the Cheesecake Factory on Friday nights, and they may have cut “the good coffee” from their diets, but TV? That’s a sacred tool.
Both theories make sense to me right now, in a stunning example of doublethink.
But, I will say that people suffering from hard times being the reason why the numbers dropped makes infinitely more sense than people all of a sudden discovering Hulu.
Really: why would people flee easy-to-use TV when these new TV+Internet technologies are so spotty?