Wood cited statistics at the Next TV Summit, held recently in San Francisco, that about 35 percent of its three-million-plus Roku set-top box owners, with access to 600 free and paid content apps, wind up either ending or reducing their pay TV packages. But 10 percent were never cable or satellite subscribers in the first place. And there are still more than 100 million cable and satellite subscribers in the U.S.
As the Roku figures suggest, cord-cutting is happening, so far, on a relatively small scale. For example, Nielsen reported that the number of households that have only broadband Internet and free broadcast channels increased by 631,000 in 2011. Meanwhile, 1.5 million homes ended TV service from cable, satellite, or telecommunications providers that same year.
In other words, the massive wave of migration is not materializing as fast as many Internet companies might hope, or as fast as cable companies and networks may fear. “So far, it doesn’t seem like it’s the tipping point,” says Fox Networks distribution president Michael Hopkins.