Audio Video News

Forget cord cutting. “Cord shaving”—the practice of paring back cable subscriptions to a bare-bones bundle offering only a handful of network channels—is apparently the latest threat keeping cable TV execs up at night.

A new study from Pivotal Research Group reveals that cord shaving is starting to impinge on cable’s household penetration, which dipped 2.4 percent in the most recent Nielsen measurement period, according to a report in Media Life Magazine.

From the report:

“We view the data as illustrative of a broader trend of ‘cord-shaving’ and subscriber interest in increasingly skinny bundles, which is a more significant threat to cable network owners than the less pronounced reality of ‘cord-cutting,’” writes Brian Wieser, senior research analyst at Pivotal.

Pivotal’s report notes that since 2014 there’s been an average 2 percent annual decline in household subscribers to individual networks.

That indicates cord shaving rather than cord cutting. The losses would be more severe if pay TV subscriptions were entirely abandoned.

It may be that people want to pay less but aren’t willing to part with pay TV entirely, since not everything you can get on cable is available online. For instance, you can’t watch cable networks’ content online unless you can verify that you’re a subscriber.

Do you subscribe to cable and, if so, have you thought about paring back? Leave a comment.