Audio Video News

Want to see your local cable operator choke on his martini? Just say two little words: "cord cutting." This is the new jargon for consumers who cancel their cable service in favor of other options, according to the Associated Press.

Those options are a mixture of old and new. The old option now becoming more popular is a TV antenna. After all, your local TV stations offer free HDTV. That won't give you, say, AMC's Mad Men or other basic or premium cable fare. But it will give you Saturday Night Live and other broadcast network programming, not to mention local news. For a lot of folks, that may be enough. Of course, you'll have to weather the now-in-progress DTV transition to get HDTV, or indeed, to continue getting any kind of broadcast TV at all.

The new option is internet video. That now includes not only YouTube but streaming of full episodes of popular shows. Picture quality isn't anything to write home about--if you want free HD with a good picture, the antenna is still the best option (plus maybe a DVR that records at a high data rate, and of course Blu-ray). Broadcast TV is also a better option for older people who would rather not operate a computer.

While the AP story includes a lot of anecdotal evidence, quoting consumers who ditched cable, the true extent of cord cutting won't emerge for real until cable companies issue earnings reports over the next few months. Given the economy's battered state and the uncomfortable shrinkage of household budgets, the cable companies have a tough row to hoe like everyone else, and some cable executives are pretty frank about it. Says the CEO of Time Warner Cable: "We are starting to see the beginning of cord cutting. People will choose not to buy subscription video if they can get the same stuff for free."