Despite Shocking Unemployment, Consumer Demand for Communications Holds Up

There's a sobering statistic in the latest research from Centris about consumer spending on communications and video service consumption: 27 percent of households reporting at least one member who lost their job in the last six months.

Most of the other findings seem consistent with other surveys taken over the last two years, though. The issue now is whether recession-induced behaviors will change as we exit the recession.

About eight percent of U.S. households said they were likely to cancel their Pay TV service in the third quarter of 2009, unchanged from the second quarter of 2009. Keep in mind that a typical churn rate for video services is about two percent a month, so those findings are relatively consistent with typical disconnect plans, and most churners simply sign up with alternate providers.

Some 18 percent of households said they were likely to cancel their home phone service and replace it with a currently-used cell phone. That is an underlying trend that might have accelerated during the recession, but was in place already.

Fully 75 percent of respondents said they would not likely downgrade their Internet access service. Virtually all other studies show high resistance to cutting back, or cutting off, Internet access services.

Nearly half of all households have contacted their current TV service providers shopping for discounts and lower-priced packages, though.

If past patterns show themselves, consumers should start spending more on enhanced services of all sorts, including premium video entertainment and mobile services, as the economic recovery takes hold. The wild card are services such as wired voice, which have been under pressure for other reasons unrelated directly to the recession.