Few Youth Living With Parents Highly Inclined to Get Pay-TV When They Strike Out on Their Own

August 16, 2013

This article is included in these additional categories:

Broadcast & Cable | Television | Youth & Gen X

TDG-Millennials-at-Home-and-Pay-TV-Intent-Aug2013More Millennials are living at home, per recent research, and that could mean bad news for the pay-TV industry. That’s because 18-24-year-old broadband subscribers don’t show much of an interest in signing up for pay-TV services once they move into their own residences, according to new data from The Diffusion Group (TDG). Just 31.3% of this group said they’d be highly inclined to do so, suggesting that they might join the group of “cord-nevers.” That group could represent up to 6% of under-35 broadband subscribers in the US and Canada, according to a study released by the Fiber to the Home (FTTH) Council Americas.

Perhaps even more disturbingly for pay-TV providers, a significant 24.9% of 18-24-year-old broadband subscribers surveyed by TDG said they were highly disinclined (bottom-2 box score on a 7-point scale) to subscribe to a pay-TV service once they move into their own space. The remaining 43.8% are neutral.

It’s a different story for online subscription video services such as Netflix. 48.7% of the respondents said they’d be highly inclined to sign up to such a service when they left home, making them 56% more likely to subscribe to an over-the-top (OTT) service than pay-TV. Only 14.4% said they were highly disinclined to sign up for an OTT service.

The results – to some extent – are understandable. Moving out of the home entails a significant amount of financial pressures, and cost does tend to be a big factor for Millennials when considering pay-TV subscriptions. The researchers also note that “in the end, it will still be less about the conduit and more about the content and value the service provides.”

Nevertheless, the study results suggest that pay-TV is not seen as a “must-have” among young adults. Last year a study found that consumers overall view their cable TV subscriptions as more expendable than their mobile phone services, and that gap most likely has expanded since then.

About the Data: The TDG data is based on a survey of 1,004 18-24-year-old broadband users residing in their parents’ home.

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