Cord Cutter Caves, Comes Back to Cable

What happens when you find out Hulu doesn’t satiate your TV diet? You go back to paying for the programming you can’t get for free.

There’s been a popular story line kicking around in the mainstream press and among techno-bloggers: that a rising number of “cord cutters” will cancel their pay-TV service because they’re able to find so much video for free on the Web (see Media Enchanted With ‘Mythical’ Cord-Cutting Creatures).

But aside from a few anecdotes — including a recent first-person account in The New York Times, “Cable Freedom Is a Click Away” — the evidence is that people aren’t abandoning subscription television. A December 2009 survey by Parks Associates found that 5.5 million U.S. households, or less than 8%, were even open to the idea of canceling their cable or satellite service because of the availability of online video, DVDs and free-to-air broadcasts (see Less Than 8% Of Consumers Would Cancel Pay TV).

Now we’re getting anecdotes about ex-cord-cutters who have come back to the pay-TV fold.

New York-based writer Dan Frommer — one of the original cord-cutters who vowed in 2008 to be a “Hulu household” forevermore — described in a post on BusinessInsider.com yesterday his failed experiment to go cable-free. First he blamed his girlfriend for forcing him to pay $80+ per month to Time Warner Cable (she edits a fashion news site and needs to see shows like Project Runway).

But then he ‘fessed up: He loves TV. “I’m super excited for the World Cup in HD, the Olympics in HD, the Tour de France this summer, and Discovery Channel’s follow up to ‘Planet Earth,’ called ‘Life,’ which begins airing in March,” Frommer wrote.

As Parks Associates’ Barrett noted: “People who have made the switch to online video are few in number, and they don’t watch much TV anyway.”