Experian: Nearly a fifth of Americans who use Netflix or Hulu don't subscribe to cable TV
Cord Cutting on The Rise, Especially Among the Young — Cord cutting is on the rise, according to a new study by Experian Marketing Services. According to the report, the number of cord cutters …
Context & Ripple Effects
Cord cutting has been a contested story since at least 2009, when the Wall Street Journal first reported households dropping cable, followed by a wave of 2010 studies — including the CNNMoney projection that one in eight would cut cable that year and the NewTeeVee numbers that cable executives publicly refused to accept. By 2011, research had already framed Netflix as an explicit catalyst for both cord cutting and cord shaving.
The Experian Marketing Services study lands five years into that argument and shifts it from anecdote to scale: nearly a fifth of Americans using Netflix or Hulu now have no cable subscription, concentrated among the young. The pickup across The Huffington Post, Business Insider, PC Magazine and Salon shows how far the story has traveled from the niche streaming press of 2010.
First-order effects
- Netflix's subscriber base now includes a large contingent paying nothing to cable operators, meaning its April peering deal with Comcast — struck after months of degraded Comcast speeds — increasingly serves viewers whose only video bill goes to Netflix.
- Younger consumers identified by Experian as the fastest-cuting cohort represent future household formation without any pay-TV relationship, shrinking the addressable base for traditional bundle marketing.
Second-order effects
- Cable operators face a pricing squeeze: holding the bundle together for remaining subscribers while the marginal young customer never signs up forces either à-la-carte offerings or rising per-subscriber fees on a shrinking pool.
- Content owners gain leverage in renewal negotiations as distributors' subscriber counts flatten, since streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu demonstrate audiences will follow programming rather than the package.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the pay-TV industry structurally splits into two markets — older bundled households generating most revenue and younger streamer-only households generating almost none — reshaping advertising reach measurement and carriage-fee economics.
- Distribution disputes like the Netflix-Comcast peering fight become recurring battlegrounds because streaming traffic growth, not channel lineups, is where the competitive pressure now sits.
The trend: American television consumption is bifurcating by age into a legacy cable bundle and a streaming-only segment, with each new study converting what cable executives dismissed as noise into a measurable structural shift.