Shuttered restaurants, bars, hotels speed up TV cord-cutting even more

Enlarge / Would you pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for cable if your restaurant looked like this right now? (credit: Justin Sullivan | Getty Images )

Everyone is stuck at home, which you would think would mean a lot more TV watching, not less. And up to a point, that's true: millions of us are putting millions of hours into streaming content from Netflix, Disney+, and others. What we aren't doing, though, is watching cable-especially sports, which aren't happening in the bars and restaurants we aren't going to.

Residential customers have been cutting the cord for years, but now commercial subscribers to pay-TV companies have started jumping into the cancellation heap, The Wall Street Journal reports. Restaurants, bars, hotels, and airlines aren't continuing to pay for pricey channel bundles when nobody is coming in, and even if they could, those viewers would have nothing to watch.

Cable operators continue to charge fees for sports programming that currently doesn't exist thanks to a fairly tangled web of rights and contracts. And while some customers could receive rebates down the line, managing cash flow today may be easier if you just cancel the package altogether. That's even truer for small businesses, which are trying to shore up enough resources to survive long-term.

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