You're paying 40% more for TV than you were 5 years ago
In fact, according to Leichtman Research's annual study, pay TV subscriptions keep going up and up. Pay TV prices have gone up 40% in the last five years, according to Leichtman.
In 2011, subscribers to pay TV, on average, paid $73.63 for cable or satellite. But in Leichtman's latest study, that number is $103.10.
Here is a chart put together by CordCutting.com that shows the steady climb of prices:
And it's not helping subscriber growth. "About 82% of households that use a TV currently subscribe to a pay-TV service," Bruce Leichtman said in a statement. "This is down from where it was five years ago, and similar to the penetration level eleven years ago." The pay-TV industry lost 800,000 last quarter subscribers last quarter, according to the research firm SNL Kagan.
Putting that on a personal level, NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke recently said his own kids don't even pay for TV. Burke has five "millennial" children, ages 19 to 28, and exactly "none" subscribe to cable or satellite, he said at a conference last week.
"It's undeniable that traditional pay-TV subscribers are in decline," Sling TV CEO Roger Lynch told Business Insider in a recent interview.
Companies like Sling are trying to step into the gap and offer more flexible streaming TV services tailored toward younger people. And others from Hulu to AT&T to Amazon are reportedly readying their own TV products to compete.