Cord-cutting headaches for pay TV have now progressed beyond just a dull, throbbing pain.

Cable, satellite and telco TV companies suffered their worst-ever quarterly subscriber declines for the three months ended June 30, collectively shedding more than half a million accounts — an accelerating erosion that’s put new pressure on operators and media companies exposed in the pay-TV biz.

Source: Cord-Cutting Gets Ugly: U.S. Pay-TV Sector Drops 566,000 Customers in Q2.

Later in this article one of the TV execs say that the customer should be the focus of this trend and not the corporate plan or such. Maybe they would like my opinion but I kind of doubt that they will get it.  I’m sure I am not alone in my feelings about Pay-TV.

If these guys want to save their jobs they need to understand that they should not be the ones who determine how they package their channels.  I shamefully admit that I pay more than $125 per month for Direct TV.  But since the average bill is over $100 I guess I am not the only fool who originally bought into the $29.95 mantra they advertise.  With that $100+ comes about 400 channels of which “sports” channels make up at least 100 of them. Another 50 or so are probably infomercials. I wonder if anyone actually watches those.

My wife is into several channels that I don’t watch and I am into some, like my car shows, that she doesn’t watch. And 80% of the offered list neither of us ever watch. Sports in any form is just something that we don’t view. They say that over half the pay-tv providers content expenses are for the sports shows.

Getting back to what this customer, and I’m sure there are many others like me, wants is an ala carte method of picking what I want to pay for. I’m sure I could cut my bill in half with a pick-and-choose method. But I guess that is maybe one of the reasons they don’t offer it. They would lose revenue. But what is worse a customer who spends half as much or a customer who leaves them entirely?

Corporations just don’t seem to give the customer the attention they used to in the good old days. I know you have been waiting for this old guy to mention the good old days. Actually I don’t do that often but to some degree it is true.

Finishing up this post with a different thought, it seems strange that AT&T would buy DirecTV this past week if their revenue is falling so drastically. But, as in the past, AT&T often does things that confuse me and I worked for them my entire corporate life. They threw away the cellphone business in the 80’s because it didn’t have growth potential! Then, of course, they panicked when it did and played catch-up for years.  But that was the old AT&T before the break-up so I shouldn’t put that on the current leadership I guess….

Question everything..