Your wireless carrier may stop you from dumping cable TV

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You might not be able to leave being your cable TV provider like you wanted.
You might not be able to leave being your cable TV provider like you wanted.

Yet another study about cord cutting—the fine art of firing your cable or satellite-TV service—offers useful reminders for the online streaming services that have taken an increasing chunk of the video market from traditional pay-TV services.

The State of Online Video 2018, from Limelight Networks (LLNW), a content-distribution firm in Tempe, Ariz., finds that cable subscribers pay for more streaming video services than non-cable subscribers. That’s good news for cable companies since it means the growth of streaming services might not mean the end for cable and satellite TV.

The study, however, also found that while we’re watching more video online, we’re also less willing to tolerate price hikes among streaming services and interrupted playback. That could be bad news for the streaming providers like Netflix and Hulu, especially when their services are increasingly tied to the Big Four wireless carriers’ below-average network performance.

How much we watch, and on what devices

Limelight’s new study—based, it says, on responses from 5,000 18-and-up regular online video viewers in France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States—leads with a big increase in time spent watching online videos.

Across all those countries, people watch 6 hours and 45 minutes of online video a week, an hour more than in the 2017 edition of this report. The U.S. increase, however, easily exceeded that: We now watch 8:23 of online video a week—well above the 6:35 figure of 2017, and not far behind the 10:20 number for broadcast, cable and satellite.

Limelight data not published in the post showed that 74.6% of U.S. viewers still subscribed to cable or satellite, a lower rate than in surveys that haven’t focused on regular streaming viewers.

Respondents in the U.S. said they were most likely to watch online video on a smartphone, followed by a computer and then either a smart TV or streaming player. In that last category of devices plugged into a TV or monitor, Amazon (AMZN) and Roku (ROKU) remain the top two brands, accounting for 22 and 21% of that market.

Sports stalling and buffer rage

Limelight’s study also calls out some risks to streaming services. In nine of the 10 nations surveyed, price hikes were the primary reason people cited for dropping an online video app. In the U.S., 62% of respondents cited that gripe.

This study called out another possible holdup for online video: sports streaming that lags just far enough behind the live action to leave fans vulnerable to seeing spoilers in social media about a game they’re watching online.