More than 400,000 American homes have cut the cord and ditched their cable and satellite pay-TV services since the start of 2012. The figure includes 169,000 subscribers shed by Time Warner Cable (TWC) last quarter, marking the service provider’s tenth consecutive quarter of customer losses. It also includes the 52,000 net subscribers DirecTV (DTV) lost this past quarter, and 176,000 customers who left Comcast (CMCSA). Reuters points to high unemployment rates, a weak housing market and regular programming factors as key contributing factors for the drop, but other factors may include the increasing amount of available Web-based content and high costs of cable and satellite-based TV service. A report from earlier this year suggested that more than 1 million U.S. households disconnected their pay-TV services in 2011.
UPDATE: Correction — it looks like that figure is closer to 425,000.
