Hear that snipping sound? No, it’s not squirrels nipping at your FiOS cord. It’s a record number of Americans cutting ties with their cable and satellite providers.

According to the AP’s analysis of cable companies’ most recent earnings reports, more people are saying “adios” to cable TV in favor of online streaming video or whatever they can get via over-the-air reception.

The AP reports that pay TV began seeing a small net loss of subscribers last year, but that number has continued to grow, with unemployment and other economic pressures being a leading reason.

Just this last quarter alone, eight of the country’s nine largest subscription-TV providers lost 195,700 subscribers (Not all nine companies could be included in the AP’s report because Cox is privately held and doesn’t share subsciber numbers). Analysts estimate that when you throw in Cox and all the smaller cable providers, there was an industry net loss of somewhere between 380,000 to 450,000 subscribers in the last quarter, twice as many losses as the same quarter in 2010.

Record numbers cancelling cable, satellite TV service [Chicago Tribune]

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