Cable TV Lost 1.1 Million Subscribers Last Quarter

The nation's six biggest names in the business (which Leichtman Research says accounts for about 95% of the market) collectively lost a little over 1.1 million customers during the three-month stretch ending in June, slowing down Q1's cord-cutting pace of more than 1.5 million, but continuing the bigger-picture cord-cutting cadence that's been a problem for the industry since 2014. Fool.com reports: AT&T led the way with its loss of 443,000 subscribers as its flagship platform DirecTV undergoes the major disruption of changing ownership hands, although the satellite-based service was bleeding customers well before the sale of DirecTV was even considered. No outfit gained subscribers, though, even including the better-established cable television brands like Comcast's Xfinity and Charter Communications' Spectrum. [...] Market research company eMarketer estimates the number of conventional cable customers in the U.S. will continue to slide at least through 2024 when the number of non-pay-TV households is likely to eclipse the number of pay-TV households.

As was noted, though, people aren't spending less time in front of their television sets. They're just watching in a different way. Streaming is quickly becoming the preferred way of consuming video. [...] Last quarter, streaming services of all ilks added on the order of 44.7 million active users/subscribers. Take that number with a grain of salt for a couple of reasons, the biggest of which is it's a worldwide number and not just a U.S. figure. The other reason to not read too much into this number is it requires multiple streaming services to fully replace a canceled cable package. Recent data from Parks Associates indicates around half the U.S. households that have cut the cord now pay for four or more streaming options. Still, in that the United States remains the key market for most of these streaming brands -- like Disney+, Discovery+, Pluto TV, and HBO Max -- it's difficult to not connect the clear demise of conventional cable television with popularization of streaming alternatives.

Deja Vu

[Ostracus]

Recent data from Parks Associates indicates around half the U.S. households that have cut the cord now pay for four or more streaming options.

Ironic since a thousand channels to watch and nothing to see plus high bills were the justification for the exodus in the first place.

Re:

[olsmeister]

Ironic because a lot of these homes are streaming their video using the exact same HFC network that carried the old-school video.

It's been awhile since I've seen any stats on it

[rsilvergun]

But at one point it was costing the cable companies about 10 to 15 dollars a month to provide service today they were charging 65 to 100 for. Most of them now charge more and the cost of providing the service is most likely gone down as technology is improved. So I don't think they are too worried about you using their Network to stream video. Sure like all people they would like all the money but they're still making money hand over fist charging for a heavily subsidized public utility that's a virtual ne

Re:

[tepples]

But at one point it was costing the cable companies about 10 to 15 dollars a month to provide service today they were charging 65 to 100 for. Most of them now charge more and the cost of providing the service is most likely gone down as technology is improved.

On the contrary: ESPN and other networks are demanding higher retransmission royalties than ever from multichannel pay TV system operators.

Re:Deja Vu

[Aighearach]

4 or 5 streaming options costs less, and probably each one has something they want to watch.

That's not "ironic," that's "obvious."

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

Yup. I know lots of people who subscribe to multiple streaming services, but only pay for a select few movies or series they like. With cable you have to sign up for pretty much everything to get the few items here and there you're interested in. It's like the big academic publishers where you have to take out a $10K subscription to get a single journal you want, both doomed models.

Re:Deja Vu

[OneHundredAndTen]

Don't be silly - many people are replacing a $150+ service with one at half the price while getting rid of hundreds of channels that they couldn't care less about, eliminating ads, and perhaps even moving to a different Internet provider. In many, many cases ditching your cable feed makes a heck of a lot of sense.

Re: Deja Vu

[guacamole]

It's easy to rewind ads if you're pre-recording content.on a dvr box.

Re:

[neilo_1701D]

Don't be silly - many people are replacing a $150+ service with one at half the price while getting rid of hundreds of channels that they couldn't care less about, eliminating ads, and perhaps even moving to a different Internet provider. In many, many cases ditching your cable feed makes a heck of a lot of sense.

Exactly. My monthly cable bill was $210. My gigabit network cost is $95 without cable TV. By ditching the tv service and adding 4 streaming subscriptions I’m saving $60/mth. We are now literally spoilt for choice over the stuff we want to watch.

What drops to this choice was the increasing amount of content available only in streaming apps and the relentless increases in some sporting fee.

Re:

[arQon]

and perhaps even moving to a different Internet provider.

LOL. You're obviously not familiar with the US broadband situation. Well, that, or your "perhaps" just means "the 0.2% of the country that HAS a second (or more) provider" - but your tone suggested you were imagining a much higher number and the only hurdle to doing so would be the trivial inconvenience of having to take an afternoon off work to let the installer in.

Yeah but ....

[big-giant-head]

My Old Direct tv bill just for TV was like 80$$ a month. Now I pay 10$ a month for Philo ( i get a discount because of Tmobile) , 6.99 for Disney , Discovery + for 4.99, Peacock 4.99 and Netflix is free (Tmobile)... throw in Pluto which costs 0.0 dollars as does OTA TV . I have a ton of content to watch and I save 53 dollars a month.

Re:

[StormReaver]

Ironic since a thousand channels to watch and nothing to see plus high bills were the justification for the exodus in the first place.

You're forgetting five other critical ones: scheduling and ads, ads, ads. Endless ads on top of a thousand channels with nothing on.

My Cable bill, when I last had Cable in 2009, was about $85/month for basic, crappy, ad-infested service. It got me into the "thousand channels to watch, but nothing on" category. When I realized that we hadn't watched TV in nearly two months, I canceled Cable.

Now I have Netflix (including the rarely used DVD service), Amazon Prime, and Disney+ (almost exclusively for The Manda

I lose things all the time

[Bite The Pillow]

Have they checked in the couch cushions?

Re:Pirating is the solution.

[DontBeAMoran]

Except that with multiple streaming services at around 10 dollars each, it means you decide what you want without having to pay a huge basic fee just to get the one package that you want.

The fact that you also decide with service you want without having to subscribe to another if you don't want to (unlike bundled channels/packages) means you can set your own price, from 10 to 100 dollars in ~10 dollars steps.

To make a food comparison, imagine if all restaurants were all-you-can-eat buffets and you had no choice but to pay the full price just to get a cup of coffee and a donut. That's why cable/satellite TV failed: pushing hundreds of crap channels that nobody wanted at insane prices just to get the one channel you wanted for the half a dozen shows you wanted to see.

Add to that the fact that you can cancel at any time without any fee (AFAIK, anyway) and the current situation is still a thousand times better than the old dying industry.

Nobody is forcing you to subscribe to all the streaming services that exists.

internet with no TV fee or small cap with no TV

[Joe_Dragon]

internet with no TV fee or small cap with no TV
But when you take TV we remove the cap.

Re:

[DontBeAMoran]

It's not the situation all over the world, you know. My ISP, for example, only does Internet access. In those cases were a company provides more than just Internet, they need to be broken up into "Internet" and 'Television" companies. Why is it tolerated to have them be able to set preferential treatments for themselves is beyond belief.

Re: Pirating is the solution.

[guacamole]

Don't subscribe to five streaming services at once. Get one or two. Take time to watch all of the shows that currently interest you, and move on to the next. In this round robin fashion you spend less and always have something to watch.

What can they do?

[jandrese]

Cable companies are in a bind. They are losing subscribers and the only option they can think of is to raise prices. I guess it's time for another price hike. It has to be clear at this point that they're pricing themselves right out of the market and yet they don't seem to care.

Re:

[inode_buddha]

Want a laugh? I remember when the local incumbent cable co came to my town and wanted to run the cable... a few months of debate at the town hall, the phone company and power company, etc... One of their big sales points was that they could do away with ads since you were paying for a subscription line. An exhorbitant $24 a month at the time.

25 years later the CEO died in prison for fraud, surprising no one.

Re:

[leonbev]

I doubt that Comcast really cares. They'll just jack up the price of their Internet only packages again to make up for the loss in profits.

I mean, what are you going to do about it? Switch over to DSL from the phone company, which probably offers 1/8th the download speed? Switch to Starlink, and pay slightly more than what you're paying now for 1/2 the speed? Neither of those are great alternatives.

and it's Failure of Managament, not obsolescence

[Neuroelectronic]

There's no good reason that cable services is failing so hard, the 1-2 punch of internet and HD television services on their own dedicated circuit is obvious.

Then again it's hard to place the blame squarely on Comcast et al. The quality of the content is what's killing cable TV. Legacy news is a joke, television is full of annoying propaganda, even history and science based content is a joke, and the only people who wouldn't care, children, are in love with YouTube and tablets, but they don't make the pur

Cable TV < Antenna TV

[WaffleMonster]

We get over 60 channels DRM free, spying free over the air for free. What's the point of paying for Cable TV?

Re:Cable TV Antenna TV

[c-A-d]

Must be nice to live in a large metropolitan centre. I live in medium-sized centre in Canada. We have four channels. No subchannels on any of the transmitters either. so it's just four.

Still, I'm glad cable TV is losing customers. The must-carry channels are horrible up here.

Make Sports Channel Premium ones and not part

[Joe_Dragon]

Make Sports Channel Premium ones and not part of the base rate.
Also locals some people can get there own antenna (but some are in areas where that is hard to pick up)

Re:

[Registered Coward v2]

Make Sports Channel Premium ones and not part of the base rate. Also locals some people can get there own antenna (but some are in areas where that is hard to pick up)

If they did that they'd have to hike the base rate to cover costs and dump channels to save fees since they'd lose a lot of people who only want sports and subsidize the other channels.

They didn't lose me last quarter

[Ranger]

They lost me two years ago.

Re:

[Megane]

Slowpoke. I cut the cord in 2001, with a MythTV on my antenna since 2013. And nothing of value was lost.

Hope they keep bleeding

[bsdetector101]

Cut off DishTV over 7 years ago because of the glut of trash for high highness. Biggest hold back to leaving is sports, but if you're smart, you learn that you can get ANYTHING for free and won't miss a single game or event. I only pay for Netflix and just started paying for Apple+ for next 4 months to watch upcoming shows then gone.

Re:

[tepples]

That or the other AC lives somewhere where the local cable company bundles TV with Internet for just barely more per month than Internet alone.

Wow. I wouldn't have thought it possible

[Opportunist]

I mean, that there were still that many left.

Is it any wonder?

[markdavis]

Cox Cable just recently downgraded almost all the small handful of channels I watch (History, Science, NatGeo, etc) from 1080P to 720P, while always increasing the prices. Now over $110/month for basic cable (no extras, no movie channels) for a ONE PERSON household. That is almost as much as my average electric bill, and almost twice my cell phone bill.

I would have already left cable and DVR for "streaming" except:

1) Few streaming platforms have decent sound. Discovery+ is 100% just stereo even though al

I'd Pay

[Thyamine]

We cut the cord but I still have paid for streaming TV services just to get a handful of channels that we still want to keep. If Verizon would get their head out of their ass and finally let us pay for TV but use their app on a Fire Stick, I would gladly pay for Fios TV and not have to hop from PS Vue to YouTube to Sling when channels come and go or go out of business or prices fluctuate. Then I could pay for cable TV, NOT pay for a damn hardware box in every room, and everyone is happy

But as we all kno

ESPN and Greed

[speedlaw]

I cut the cord when two thing happened in short order....my suburban cable co decided to scramble the digital signal...that meant $8 per box now needed to unscramble a signal they scrambled for their own purposes, to make bill collection easier. This was now $8 x 3 x 12 per year. The next month they added $7 x12 sports fee for ESPN, a channel I never watch. This was on top of the fees for "hd", and "programing". So, $374 increase per year, for literally *nothing*. I used cablecars over the years in tivos and the little know Sony HDD 250 (still the best overall DVR made). Today, I have an antenna ($125 with fittings, once), hooked up to two Tivo Roamios with lifetime ($500, once). We stream via Roku and a mac mini for less official streams. Our cable co banged us a while back for another $20 per month for broadband...so that was a thing I see CATV a few times a year when I go to a hotel. The commercial/promo load is so high I can't watch it. I would only subscribe if I was in an apartment or so far from a transmitter that I couldn't get a signal (and I'd try first, even with big array)