26% Of People Who Call Their Cable Company Are Asking If They Can Cancel TV Service

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Yesterday we dumped a big bunch of data on you about how TV audiences are declining in the face of the onslaught of mobile media.

Here's the most telling fact from the whole thing: About 26% of customers who call US cable TV companies request "internet only" service, according to a survey of those calls by mobile advertising technology company Marchex. Of those customers, at least 60% actually end up getting internet-only service, Marchex says.

The survey results - which came from 500 random phone calls via Marchex's Call Analytics customer phonecall monitoring technology - show that people increasingly don't want to pay for old-fashioned TV.

Name one other industry where one in four consumers calls up the company to ask not to have access to its main product.

MarchexChen Zhao, director of analytics for the Marchex Institute.

In place of TV consumers want the internet - through which they can get the video they want, which can also include TV programming - instead.

And numbers from BI Intelligence show that digital media - following a boom on the mobile web - is about to replace TV as the top venue for both audience share and ad revenue.

Chen Zhao, director of analytics for the Marchex Institute, told Business Insider, "It's clear that consumers want very specific things from their cable providers - and at the most fundamental level, they increasingly just want a reliable internet connection to serve as a gateway to their own channels and choices."