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For years cable and satellite companies have maintained they're not afraid of people canceling their service and watching video over the Internet (i.e. cutting the cord), but the cord nevers — the young people who never sign up for pay-TV service in the first place — are a totally different story. The pay TV providers are sensing that a generational shift in the way that young people think of their video entertainment. Last night, Dish chairman Charlie Ergan made a rare admission at the AllThingsD D Conference — "I think people are cutting the cord" — but then shifted to an entirely different problem: "I think we ought to be hooking people on pay TV when they are young." In other words, head off the cord-nevers, not cord-cutters. Kids these days often don't see cable as a necessity, opting for a mix of Internet options instead of the pricey TV bundles filled with channels they don't want — and media execs haved started to notice.

That statement makes Ergan the second TV bigwig to admit that young people are approaching television media differently than previous generations. At the end of last year, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes invoked the very term "cord never," admitting that these people exist. Unlike Ergan, Bewkes thinks cord-nevers will eventually grow up, start earning more money, and then become paying customers for the quality television cable packages he offers because streaming TV can't and never will offer all the best stuff. (With shows like Netflix's House of Cards that, however, is debatable.)