When the economy started go sour, millions of Americans and other people around the world started to look for ways to save money. Many companies providing home phone services noted that customers were leaving in favor of mobile phones only. The same thing has been happening with cable providers as well.

Cable companies have traditionally increased the cost of their TV services each year, often with no improvement in the offerings. As people start looking to save money, many are leaving cable providers. Gigaom reports that it has cobbled together the number of cable subscribers lost for four of the top five cable companies around the country for Q3 2010 and the number of folks leaving cable is growing.

According to the calculations Gigaom put together, about 500,000 cable subscribers walked away from cable firms in Q3. That number counts what major companies reported in their earnings reports. Comcast lost 275,000 basic cable subscribers alone. Time Warner lost 155,000, Charter Communications lost 63,800 subscribers, and Cablevision lost 24,500 subscribers.

The 500,000 number is in reality much less than the actual losses by cable companies overall when small regional carrier losses are figured in along with Cox Communications' losses. Cox is a private company and doesn’t report its subscriber losses, yet is the third largest provider in the country. Over the long haul, most customers that leave traditional cable TV providers have ended up as customers with satellite or IPTV firms with these firms reporting subscriber gains that offset the majority of losses in the cable industry.

However, Gigaom reports that over the last few quarters the number of subscribers lost from cable and gained at satellite and IPTV firms is not matching up. Many people are just walking away from paying for TV. This is getting easier to do with most major networks offering their programs online free and services like Hulu offering old shows for fans to watch.

Once Hulu Plus hits with more content and movies, many will opt to pay the expected $5 monthly for that rather than a cable bill averaging over $100 monthly.