Cut the Cord.

I read this brilliant piece last night from Steve Krakauer on how TV needs to greatly improve its value. One of the reasons I enjoyed it is because my wife and I recently became “cord-cutters” and we did so not out of monetary reasons but because of that perception of value and lack of customer service.

If you have been a customer of a cable or dish provider you likely know where this is going. You wake up one Sunday and see that your provider is offering a killer deal for “new” customers or you open a bill and see that your cost has gone up, your next step is to call your provider and feign anger at which point they answer “Mister ___________ I see you have been a customer for X number of years. As a valued customer, we can give you __________________ package as a thank you for your business.” We had been customers of our service for 11 years — which was too long to have the same argument over and over again, so we cut the cord.

We are now three months into this experiment and have not missed subscription TV at all. Nearly everything we want to consume is available on XBOX One, Netflix, and we watch all but the NFL Sunday night games using over the air signals. In fact, the only product I miss are the UFC fights that appear on Fox Sports 1, but that isn’t enough of a reason to keep the abusive relationship that is subscription television.

As an interesting side effect, our nearly 4-year-old daughter has never watched a show on TV, ever. In this context, she will likely become a cord-never, meaning she will never pay to have a TV service if the platform stays in its current state. She consumes media only on Netflix and has a hard time understanding things like commercials or WiFi outages, I am sure this may change as she gets older and the peer pressure to keep up on some shows grows but for now she sees no value in live or even recorded TV.

Steve’s explanation of TV ratings is vital to understanding the current state of TV and why it isn't changing, juxtaposed to our want and need for it to supply a level of value we feel it should in 2015. Some of the reason for that confusion is explained here, you cannot compare digital and over the air ratings because the numbers just can’t add up to make an apt comparison, Joe Marchese explains it better than I do — so read his piece above.

One of the best examples of why the shift isn’t happening the way some are explaining is live sports, the money is just far too big for a dramatic shift to occur. This is especially true when you talk about the NFL which is why in some cities you have to suffer through re-runs of Modern Family while the rest of the country watches football. That decision isn’t about the customer, it is about contracts and dollars.

With the launch of Apple TV we seem to take a step closer to what Steve Krakauer talks about when he paints a picture of a service where I can curate my experience based on keywords or characters inside an episode or season. That expanded value is something that the current iteration of television is missing.

Make no mistake TV is part of the media landscape and when used in tandem with social platforms can be a very powerful tool. This is why Twitter used the World Series broadcast to put out an ad for Twitter Moments, which was the first time they used the medium.

As with most reports on the death of a mass medium, TV’s is a bit overstated at this point. But, disruption is real and is causing shifts across the media landscape so to stand still is the worst thing you could do. The best thing you could do is double-down on your customers and put value and customer service first — because lots of people can make a product, but very few can make it an experience worth keeping.