"How many people have really given up cable or satellite for internet only delivery of content? 100k at the most? Based on company reports, it seems like people are giving up their wired telephone lines at home long before they give up their cable/sat/telco TV" --Mark Cuban via http://blogmaverick.com
I was curious of these numbers myself, so I did a little bit of "back of the napkin" type estimating:
I couldn't find any exact numbers for boxee users. A quick glance at the forum stats at boxee claim over 18k users. Since most users will not bother to take the extra steps necessary to create the extra account, we can guess that there might be 8-10x as many "regular" users of boxee who haven't signed up for the forums. This puts the number of boxee users at around 162k (maybe Boxee can enlighten us, I feel like this must be under the actual number).
At the "Big Green Button" website, a simple forum for users of windows media center, they currently have 126,312 users. Again, there are probably many more people (frequently or infrequently) browsing the forums that don't take the time to register, maybe we could put that number at 500k.
Since these numbers might not actually fit into reality, let's take a company that has released some hard data for us to digest. Through http://bit.ly/gAmR, we see that in December, Apple reported that its AppleTV sales were up almost 300%, year over year. Analysts predicted that Apple would sell over 2 million units in 2009, but if Apple keeps up its growth at the same pace, it's on line to sell 6.6 million units. I think this is pretty impressive for a company that doesn't really promote the TV unit as hard as its other products.
So you end up with maybe 7-8 million people with media centers and AppleTVs. This doesn't include the other self contained media centers (HP put one out, some other brand had one at Best Buy). Of course, only some portion of all of these millions of users will not pay cable television subscription fees. I would guess anywhere from 25-50% of the users don't pay fees (remember that a lot of these users will be using an antenna to get *free*, HD network TV over the internet). Another interesting statistic to know would be the growth of antenna purchases, but it's hard to get an accurate number for that. Regardless, that would put the number of antenna + internet TV users at around 3-4 million. I think we can all agree that this number is much less important that how fast the segment grows.
For what it's worth, since my buddy cancelled cable (along with my wife and me), there are probably 15 people that are seriously considering reducing their cable services. In the end, at least a handful of them will take the plunge. It seems like it is something that people are genuinely interested in.
I would also guess that Mark is right about the phone service. I think it's just another example of the trend though, where end users don't want to pay for services that they don't use, especially when those services are expensive. As soon as a viable alternative emerges, customers will switch.
I'll end this post with a disclaimer that I am not an expert on the economics of the existing television models. The whole argument seems to be between advertising based internet-delivered shows versus the traditional cable delivery model. I'm curious how much revenue shows are seeing from the iTunes and Amazon video on demand model, where users pay $2 per show. What sort of per-viewer revenue does a show see on network television from advertising?
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