TV Service Provider Wars

By Andy Golub and Paul Carton

A recent ChangeWave survey of 2,830 respondents found that price is now the key issue when consumers decide to switch TV service providers.

Forty-eight percent of respondents who plan to switch their cable, satellite or fiber-optic TV provider in the next six months said price is the No. 1 reason for their planned move.

That's a big jump from our August survey, when only 37% of respondents cited price as their chief reason for switching.



Customer Satisfaction

Regardless of price, one segment of the industry continues to lead in terms of customer satisfaction by a country mile.

When respondents were asked how satisfied they are with their current TV service provider, 17% said very satisfied, while 50% said they were somewhat satisfied. But when we broke it down by type of provider, the survey results showed fiber-optic TV services to be in a class by themselves.

Not only did fiber-optic customers give the highest marks to their TV service provider -- with an industry leading 42% saying they were very satisfied -- but that's up seven points since the previous survey conducted in August.



Satellite TV service providers garnered a 25% very-satisfied rating from their customers, down five points from previously. At the bottom of the barrel were cable service providers with a 12% very-satisfied mark -- unchanged from August.

How does this break down at the company level?

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Verizon's (VZ) FiOS service tops the list in terms of having the highest percentage of customers who said they are very or somewhat satisfied with their provider (92%). AT&T's (T) U-Verse service came in second (87%).

DirecTV (85%) and Dish Network (DISH) (82%) came in third and fourth, respectively, followed by the major cable companies.

Switching Contest

So who are the industry's big winners and losers when it comes to customer switching?

Certainly it's not the cable service providers. Only 15% of customers who plan to switch services cited a cable provider as their next choice. The big industry winners, in a split decision, are the fiber-optic (43%) and satellite (41%) service providers.

At the company level, DirecTV (26%) tops the list of providers that customers plan to move to in the next six months.

Just behind, in a dead heat, are Verizon's FiOS (21%) and AT&T's U-Verse (21%) services.



Click here to check out more of the latest ChangeWave research findings.

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The ChangeWave Alliance Research Network is a group of 20,000 highly qualified business, technology and medical professionals -- as well as early adopter consumers -- who work in leading companies of select industries. ChangeWave surveys its network members weekly on a range of business and consumer topics, and converts the information into a series of proprietary quantitative and qualitative reports.

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