On November of last year I wrote a post on the future of the OTT platforms and at the end I made my forecast which in many cases for a “digital” guy may sound counterintuitive:
“In a nutshell, despite plenty of facts around rapidly changing user behavior and increasing video consumption on OTT platforms, I do envision shifts in revenue and launch of new services, but not great changes to the structure of the TV industry in the next 10 years.”
Comcast’s recent earnings results validate my forecast that cord cutting is not as profound as some in the industry believe it is:
This is what The Wall Street Journal wrote:
CORD-ADDING: Long live the bundle? Comcast Corp. , the biggest cable company in the U.S., only lost 36,000 video subscribers in 2015, its best performance in nearly a decade. And the company actually added 89,000 video customers during its most recent quarter. So the cable world isn’t ending? Are the cord-nevers changing their minds? Maybe, reports WSJ. Cable companies have definitely upped their game, with better products, more palatable “skinny bundles” and faster broadband speeds. Even the most anti-bundle consumers need to subscribe to broadband from somebody, and when that somebody is offering you great discounts if you just add some cable TV to your mix, perhaps it’s hard to resist? It’s probably dangerous to declare all of cable TV’s problems solved in one good quarter, but NBCUniversal Chief Executive Steve Burke on Wednesday confidently declared that the big bundle “is going to continue to be a very good business for a long time.”
As I wrote in my original article, my predictions have a high probability of being wrong. Maybe with this one I am right, which would make my prediction that my “predictions have a high probability of being wrong” wrong!