Many people thought cutting the TV cord would save money. You’d ditch the satellite dish, pay for Netflix instead, and pocket the difference.
According to a new survey, it hasn’t worked out that way. The average UK viewer now spends around £82 a month on TV and video, about £8 more than a year ago, even though most people say they’ve been trying to cut back.
The figures come from TiVo, the company whose technology powered Virgin Media’s TiVo boxes for years (and now powers the Aero Freely box). It surveyed nearly 4,500 UK adults for its annual UK Video Trends Report.
The report also shows where that money is going, and why more people are paying for Pay-TV again, at a time when it’s getting hard to say what Pay-TV even is.
Cheap On Its Own, Expensive Together
Six in 10 people in TiVo’s survey say they’ve cut back on what they spend on video. So how did the average bill go up?
It makes sense once you look at where the money goes. The traditional TV bill, from providers like Sky and Virgin Media, has barely changed in a year.
Spending on streaming subscriptions, on the other hand, went up by about a quarter.
That’s how streaming gets you. No single service feels overly expensive. Netflix with adverts, a few pounds for Paramount+, Disney+ for the kids: each one looks like small change next to an old Sky bill.
But they stack up, and according to TiVo, the average viewer in England now pays for more than five different TV and video services.
Sport is where it really adds up. The Premier League alone is split between Sky Sports and TNT Sports, and when NOW split Sky Sports in two this month, we worked out that watching every televised match by going direct costs almost £50 a month, before you’ve paid for any other service.
On top of that, the price rises now arrive every year, and they often hit the cheapest plans hardest. Netflix’s plan with adverts, the one that’s meant to tempt people in, went from £5.99 to £7.99 in September.
TiVo carried out its survey between April and June, too, so this autumn’s round of rises from Paramount+, Netflix and Disney+ isn’t in these figures yet.
More services also mean more apps. More than three-quarters of the people TiVo surveyed now switch between apps in a single sitting, and almost half say that having to browse through several apps to find something to watch is annoying.
The industry’s answer, increasingly, is to put everything back in one place, which is an idea cord cutters might recognise.
The Bundle Is Back
The whole point of cutting the cord was to get out of the TV package, with its hundreds of channels you never watch, its long contract and its yearly price rise you can’t escape.
Instead, you’d pick the streaming services you actually wanted, and drop them when you were done.
Now those same streaming services are being packaged back up. Sky includes Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max in its TV bundles.
Vodafone TV, which launched this month, puts Freely, Netflix and HBO Max on a two-year contract with a price rise every April, and BT TV does much the same with NOW and Netflix.
The streaming services are even bundling each other: Channel 4’s live channel is moving into Disney+ next year.
TiVo’s survey suggests that’s where many cord cutters are heading. When people who plan to cancel their TV package were asked what they’ll watch instead, more than half said a paid streaming service with live TV channels.
Only around a quarter plan to rely on free streaming apps, such as Pluto TV, Samsung TV Plus or The Roku Channel, instead.
For a lot of people, then, cutting the cord now means changing how the TV package gets into the house, from a dish or cable to broadband. The monthly bill and the contract come along with it.
So What Even Is Pay-TV Now?
On the face of it, TiVo’s Pay-TV figures look like bad news for cord cutting.
More people in the survey have Pay-TV than a year ago, now more than six in 10, and Sky is by far the biggest provider. Nearly a third of today’s Pay-TV customers say they cut the cord once before, then went back.
That sounds like people giving up on streaming. But it depends what they went back to.
Pay-TV used to mean something fairly specific: a dish on the wall or a cable in the street, a box under the TV, and a long contract.
But Sky Stream has no dish, works with any broadband provider, and can be taken on a rolling monthly contract that you can cancel at any time. We’ve argued before that it’s really a streaming service that happens to come with Sky’s channels and its own box.
NOW gives you many of the same Sky channels in an app, with no box at all. Vodafone TV is Freely plus streaming services like Netflix, delivered over broadband, on a contract.
Which of those are Pay-TV, and which are cord cutting?
TiVo doesn’t split its Sky customers between satellite and streaming, so there’s no way to tell how many of those “returners” went back to a dish. Some of them may simply be watching Sky’s channels without one, on a contract they can leave next month.
We used to separate Pay-TV from cord cutting by how the pictures got to your house. With so much of it now arriving over broadband, that doesn’t tell you much.
Whether you can walk away when you want to tells you a lot more (but the reverse is also true – with streaming services like Disney+ and Apple TV also giving you discounts for signing up for a full year in advance).
What We Actually Got: Flexibility
Streaming didn’t make TV cheaper, then. It did give us more control over when we pay, and for what.
TiVo’s figures show people using it. More than a third of streaming subscribers say they’re likely to cancel a service in the next six months, and more than half of all viewers now use free, ad-supported services alongside (or instead of) paid ones.
That’s why the £82 average doesn’t have to be your bill. You can keep one or two services at a time, sign up for the show you want, cancel when it’s over, and lean on free services in between.
It’s the approach cord cutting was always about, and it still works. A £2 price rise matters a lot less when you can cancel the next day.
The catch is that providers increasingly want that flexibility back in return for a better price. NOW’s cheapest sports prices need a 12-month commitment, and Disney+’s cheapest way in is a six-month saver.
Vodafone TV and BT TV run for two years, and Sky Stream customers on a long contract can’t leave penalty-free when Sky puts its prices up.
Sometimes the discount is worth it, if you know you’ll want that service for the whole term. But going by TiVo’s figures, cutting the cord on its own didn’t shrink anyone’s bill.
Being able to leave is the part of the deal we actually gained, so it’s worth thinking twice before trading it back for a few pounds off.
For more TV and streaming news, Subscribe to our free newsletter.