Cord cutting. Cord shaving. Cord nevering. No matter what you call it, it’s a sweltering topic in the world of pay TV, supposedly driven in big part by Millennials who show distaste for signing up for or keeping a “traditional TV service.”

Handy-dandy guides for kicking pay TV providers to the curb have been popping up, including a fairly detailed one from personal finance website the Simple Dollar. “One in four Millennials doesn’t subscribe to cable and 11% of them never have,” Simple Dollar states in its blog. “As a whole, cable providers lost 600,000 customers in just three months last year, compared with 500,000 in all of 2014. So, yeah, this is a thing.”

It’s definitely a thing, but research around the issue shows a murkier landscape than just a whole bunch of young people with their scissors at the ready.

Digitalsmiths, the research division of TiVo, kicked off its recently released “Q4 2015 Video Trends Report” by saying one of the first things it was looking to understand was the audience without a pay TV provider, as well as those who are currently on the fence about leaving their current provider.

Of the respondents who answered, “I do not have a pay TV provider,” 17.5% cut cable in the last 12 months, a decrease of 1.8% Q/Q. Of those respondents without pay TV, 45.5% use an antenna to access basic TV channels, which is flat Q/Q. Interestingly, the cord-cutter audience experienced little growth in Q4 2015, according to Digitalsmiths.

New global data from Nielson seems to indicate that most consumers aren’t ready to slice, and they’re more likely to want to supplement traditional TV vs. leave it altogether.

However, while the majority of respondents in the Nielson global online survey (68%) say they have no plans to cancel their existing traditional service in favor of an online-only service, almost one-third (32%) say they do plan to cut the cord.

Responses were highest in Asia-Pacific, where 44% of respondents indicate they plan to cancel their cable or satellite service for or an online-only service. Less than one-quarter of Latin American (24%), North American (22%) and European (17%) respondents have plans to cancel, Nielson reports.

When it comes to actually pulling the trigger, only a small percentage of those who expressed a desire to drop their multichannel cable and satellite TV service actually did so, according to a recent Nielsen study in the U.S.

“The increasing popularity of online-only video services will continue to put pressure on networks and cable and satellite TV providers, but a substantial replacement of one for the other is unlikely,” Megan Clarken, president at Nielsen Product Leadership, says. “While some consumers are cutting back on traditional TV services, many aren’t severing the cord completely. For most viewers, online and traditional services are not mutually exclusive, but complementary.”

Clarken observes that online-only services, networks and multichannel video programming distributors face many of the same challenges, including rapidly evolving consumer preferences, an overabundance of choice and rising content costs. “In the near term, cord shaving is likely the biggest threat as consumers evaluate the benefit of premium services or networks and consider slimmer channel packages that provide a better match for both preferences and wallets,” she says.

For its part, Digital TV Research is reporting that the number of pay TV subs in Canada and the U.S. will fall from 112 million in the peak year of 2012 to 106 million in 2021, according to the recently released edition of the firm’s “Digital TV North America Forecasts” report.

“At first glance, this does not indicate a massive cord-cutting problem. However, the number of non-pay TV homes will climb from 20.7 million to 33.3 million over the same period (as the number of households will continue to increase). To put it another way, pay TV penetration will drop from 87.1% in 2012 to 80.3% in 2021,” Simon Murray, principal analyst at Digital TV Research, says.