US Pay-TV Subscriptions Fall To Lowest Levels Since 1992 (variety.com) 53
TV providers in the U.S. collectively lost 2.3 million customers in the first quarter of 2023. "With the Q1 decline, total pay-TV penetration of occupied U.S. households (including for internet services like YouTube TV and Hulu) dropped to 58.5% -- its lowest point since 1992," reports Variety, citing a report from MoffettNathason. "As of the end of Q1, U.S. pay-TV services had 75.5 million customers, down nearly 7% on an annual basis." From the report: Cable TV operators' rate of decline in Q1 reached -9.9% year over year, while satellite providers DirecTV and Dish Network fell -13.4%. In addition, so-called "virtual MVPDs" (multichannel video programming distributors) lost 264,000 customers in Q1, among the worst quarters to date for the segment. "The picture is not one that suggests that a plateau in the rate of decline is coming any time soon," Moffett wrote.
Comcast, the largest pay-TV provider in the country, dropped 614,000 video customers in Q1 -- the most of any single company -- to stand at 15.53 million at the end of the period. Asked about dwindling video business on the company's earnings call, David Watson, president and CEO of Comcast Cable, acknowledged the reality of cord-cutting and said the operator's approach is "to not subsidize unprofitable video relationships." He added, "We'll fight hard, whether it's acquisition, base management or retention. So it's important to us, but we have figured out a way to manage it financially."
Google's YouTube TV was the only provider tracked by MoffettNathanson that picked up subs in Q1, adding an estimated 300,000 subscribers in the period (to reach about 6.3 million) and netting 1.4 million subscribers over the past year. Hulu, meanwhile, has barely grown over the past three years (and loss about 100,000 live TV subs in Q1), Moffett noted, while FuboTV lost 160,000 subscribers in North America in the first quarter to mark its worst quarterly loss on record. MoffettNathason argues that the "pay TV floor" is between 50 million and 60 million U.S. homes. "As things stand, we expect cord-cutting to grow even worse and the long-theorized 'floor' to be breached."
Comcast, the largest pay-TV provider in the country, dropped 614,000 video customers in Q1 -- the most of any single company -- to stand at 15.53 million at the end of the period. Asked about dwindling video business on the company's earnings call, David Watson, president and CEO of Comcast Cable, acknowledged the reality of cord-cutting and said the operator's approach is "to not subsidize unprofitable video relationships." He added, "We'll fight hard, whether it's acquisition, base management or retention. So it's important to us, but we have figured out a way to manage it financially."
Google's YouTube TV was the only provider tracked by MoffettNathanson that picked up subs in Q1, adding an estimated 300,000 subscribers in the period (to reach about 6.3 million) and netting 1.4 million subscribers over the past year. Hulu, meanwhile, has barely grown over the past three years (and loss about 100,000 live TV subs in Q1), Moffett noted, while FuboTV lost 160,000 subscribers in North America in the first quarter to mark its worst quarterly loss on record. MoffettNathason argues that the "pay TV floor" is between 50 million and 60 million U.S. homes. "As things stand, we expect cord-cutting to grow even worse and the long-theorized 'floor' to be breached."
No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
People finally wised up to having 200 channels and only 5 of them being worth watching...and only part of the time even at that.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
People finally wised up to having 200 channels and only 5 of them being worth watching...and only part of the time even at that.
Unfortunately we're well on our way to 200 streaming services, with only 5 of them being worth watching at any given time.
Actually the industry is consolidating (Score:3)
Another example is Disney+ now consolidating with Hulu.com.
Re:Actually the industry is consolidating (Score:4, Informative)
Hulu is jointly owned by Disney and was Disney's content provider for non-Disney productions., so it's not exactly the same. Disney is just paying themselves to put content on a platform that they already own. They're basically just shuffling money out of their Hulu profits into Disney+ so that it appears to be more profitable.
It won't fix the fact that nobody watches their newly produced content, and it doesn't exactly bring in a ton of new subscriptions. You also have to remember that Disney+ comes with services like Verizon's unlimited family plans. Profits are small for vendor deals like that, but it sure bloats their subscriber count which they love to market.
Aside from Amazon recently, everyone else already licenses their content. Showtime, HBO, etc.. They have always licensed content to other service providers, but they also started as content providers so I suppose it's different there.
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At least with streaming services you don't necessarily have to be subscribed when the show first airs. You can watch it any time later.
That also means you can wait until the first season is finished to see if it gets renewed or cancelled before deciding if you want to invest time in it. Streaming services need to figure out a way to measure how many people are doing that, if they aren't willing to stick with shows for more than the initial run of 9 episodes before writing them off.
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People finally wised up to having 200 channels and only 5 of them being worth watching...and only part of the time even at that.
Unfortunately we're well on our way to 200 streaming services, with only 5 of them being worth watching at any given time.
Nope. About three or four will do it for most people. This already is vastly cheaper than cable. In addition, suspending the service and enabling it again is straightforward with some streaming providers - that's what I do in order to watch the Star Trek series in Paramount.
Re: No surprise (Score:2)
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isn't it EA?
https://blogking.uk/ea-became-... [blogking.uk]
https://marketrealist.com/p/wh... [marketrealist.com]
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Comcast sells backend services to various streaming apps and they have a massive content catalog.
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Well, I recently considered giving streaming services a try, but I was unable to find anything worth watching there either. Maybe my standards are too high.
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Yep, that was what I figured. Seems to me that these days the occasional (rare) good show gets cancelled and crap rules the market.
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If you only download the free ones you get several times the content you’d have gotten in a basic cable package.
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TV (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:TV (Score:4, Insightful)
And streaming is going there. Have you watched the average streaming service lately? It's the same. Most of what they offer is filler and junk they got for free when they bought that one movie or series they parade out as an "exclusive", and now they started adding commercials, too.
Dear Netflix and Amazon Prime: If we wanted that shit, we could have stayed with cable. It's already there. We came to you exactly because you're not cable. If you want to go the way cable is going, more power to you, but don't expect us to pay for something we abandoned already once before. Because with you, it's even more painfully obvious than it was with cable TV that we pretty much rent you for half an hour of entertainment per week because the rest of the crap you offer is unwatchable.
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It always amazes me when I hear guys talk about how much they hate cable and they’re paying hundreds of dollars a month in optional services and hardware rental.
Like how did that happen? My neighbor is barely holding on to her house while doing this nonsense.
Put your money where your mouth is, that’s like $2500 a year and you can’t figure out how to do it cheaper?
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Username checks out. Why are you paying that?
I think I'm at around $130 if I'm including streaming services. And that's including cell service for two.
The reason they make such a bad product is because apparently some people are still willing to buy it.
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Back before covid there was a story on here that they were going to raise fees because the remaining chumps were too hooked to quit so they can charge anything they want cause they would have left by now if they were ever gonna do it.
Obviously that didn’t happen but they were right that they do have a bunch of punching bag customers.
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Great news! (Score:5, Funny)
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The problem is that that exactly isn't happening. Instead, they'll create their own reruns of their favorite shows with the streaming services they have instead and "seeking the truth for themselves" will continue to be "I don't want to blindly believe bullshit A, so instead I'll blindly believe bullshit B for the sole reason that it's not bullshit A".
Re: Great news! (Score:1)
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Did you forget a sarcasm tag? Sorry, it's not a dystopian thriller movie with a surprise happy ending. People aren't waking up from their entertainment stupor. They're just too poor and TikTok and Youtube are free. Future generations will avoid these mistakes but I think it's too late for the ones already affected.
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I am absolutely delighted that people are finally wising up and no longer falling for being endlessly "entertained" by pixels changing colour on a screen with no interaction whatsoever. It's fantastic to see people rediscovering the great outdoors, socialising with real people, becoming creative again and giving the couch potato lifestyle the heave-ho for the first time since television was introduced. Soon the effects of the populace consuming decades worth of misinformation will start to wear off as people no longer content with being fed lies on politically biased news channels will seek out the truth for themselves. What a time to be alive!
That's a long winded (and slightly inaccurate) way of saying that "TV is getting replaced by TikTok" :)
Same same (Score:1)
How are subscription-based streaming services such as Netflix not counted as "Pay-TV"?
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It's just a name to separate them because they have a completely different business model... Most notably they serve 1 minute of ads for every 2 minutes of viewing, and they don't produce their own content.
I mean if you can watch netflix on a smart phone, then why aren't they called televisions?
Netflix doesn't do sports (Score:2)
How are subscription-based streaming services such as Netflix not counted as "Pay-TV"?
The summary mentions "multichannel video programming distributors", which in the industry refers to the same sort of linear TV experience as conventional cable and satellite television. Netflix is primarily scripted video on demand, not live events such as sport matches. Netflix has been considering any sort of live programming for only about a year, and most of that is talent competitions with live viewer voting and stand-up comedy specials.[1]
[1] "Netflix Exploring Live Streaming For First Time; Plans To [deadline.com]
I think I speak for anybody with a brain (Score:2)
and an internet connection:
What's Pay-TV?
Actually...
What's TV?
Fuck TV. I'm old enough to know TV as "that thing that violently tries to brainwash you 45 minutes out of every hour with retarded advertisement, but if you don't like book and you don't want to drive to Blockbuster, you have no choice but to watch it." As soon as movies became downloadable in the early 2000's, I quit paying for TV. And BOY! did it feel liberating.
Nowadays, you can get the content you want everwhere you want anything you want, an
MVPD TV's advantage is still sports (Score:2)
if you don't like book and you don't want to drive to Blockbuster, you have no choice but to watch it.
The argument I've read in the past is that if you don't want to drive to a ballpark or your local club is playing a road game, you have no choice but to watch sports on TV.
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I watch almost all my sports from various free websites. I would be happy to pay for the content, but the local market deals block me from watching my team. I live in San Diego but am a Denver Broncos fan. Even if I buy Paramount+ premier to gain access to CBS live sports, there is a chance I won't be seeing the specific game I want to see, despite CBS being the channel that will have most of the Denver games.
So instead I am forced onto the free streaming sites. I'd really rather just pay so I can skip some
Sparking an industry wide debate? (Score:2)
To offer customers a wider range of crap, and in each category more crap, or instead concentrate the money, and best talent, into making far fewer shows, of much higher quality.
3 BIG PROBLEMS. (Score:3)
The first and biggest problem is that Cable/Satellite TV services are becoming less and less of the "everything in one place" type of service that they used to be in the past. Content creation companies in many cases can simply launch their own streaming services and provide their content directly to their customers via that method instead.
The second problem is that prices for traditional Cable/Satellite TV services, especially when all of the "good" packages are included, has become astronomical. This isn't simply because those companies are "greedy". Because of the first problem described above, content creation companies (including sports, etc) are now in a better position to negotiate higher rates to have their content included in these traditional Cable/Satellite TV services. This cost is then, of course, passed on to consumers.
The third problem is commercials... Most modern TV shows have more commercials than they did in the past. The average length of an "hour-long" TV show episode has steadily decreased since the 90's to make room for more commercials. Most people are sick to death of being constantly barraged by commercials, *especially* when they are watching those shows on a pay-TV service that they already pay a high monthly cost for. The fact that most subscription TV services have cracked down heavily upon the ability to fast-forward through advertisements is salt-in-the-wound. Commercials are understandably easier to tolerate when you are watching content on a free streaming service/app...
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They actually becoming vertically integrated and are spreading out to offer as many other subscription services as they can capture in a single sales call.
The points from your post have all been bouncing around in the minds of cable execs and they’re well into plans to address them.
It is Pay TV packaging all over again. (Score:2)
However most of us can't cut the cord (Score:1)
since Cable is how we get our internet
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Unless you have satellite internet, it's still coming to you via a cable, just a different cable.
(or often even the same cable, since Cable TV companies are often the same as Internet Service companies.)
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I use cellular for all my Internet needs. So no cords at all. My plan is cheap, has unlimited talk/text/data/hotspot (capped speed 5mb but that's enough for a single person). I don't play online games so 5mb is enough for streaming or anything else I want to do really. $30 a month, flat.
P.S. Well, I play Wurm Unlimited but that does just fine on my Internet. I don't play MODERN online games so if it lags (it doesn't) I don't really care.
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So much free (Score:1)
Still dealing with TV? (Score:2)
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This isn't at all a new phenomenon. New and thought provoking is far riskier for content creators so has never been the norm
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That's not true, in my experience. It goes in waves. The current wave began more or less in the 90s when all TV and movies turned to crap. Before that, there actually was some original stuff. There was tons of innovation in the 50s and 60s, then garbage in the 70s...
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Shrugs, I loved Friends, Forensic Files, Family Guy, Futurama and quite a few other shows that came out between 90 and 2010. There is so much content that you are definitely going to find something you like.
P.S. Ironic all those shows started with the letter F.
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Those sure are some rose colored glasses you've got on there!
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Over-the-Air still works (Score:4, Interesting)
Whenever TV comes up, I get a backpat for my link to my Over-the-Air cord-cutter lecture for my local Unix Users Group:
http://brander.ca/cordcutcuug/ [brander.ca]
Over-the-Air now has the option of storing the 18Mbps digital stream as a standard MPG, meaning you own it, not the cable company. You can compress it with FFMPEG, save movies, keep whole seasons of TV.
Over-the-Air still carries several TV shows per year that are popular, talked-about, decent quality. And, what cord-cutters always want, is the local news. Because I control my DVR - that is to say, the purchased Digitizer product just drops a bunch of MPG files in a Unix or Windows directory every day. So, I can grab ALL the news, then delete every night with a cron bash script, and never think about it - the most recent news shows are always just there, and only today's. Or I can clip out one news article, compress it to H265 and 540x960, and save a news item for a few megabytes.
It wasn't the cost that got to me about cable, it was the shitting DVRs. The first HD DVRs, around 2000-2010, were good quality. But once we'd converted and had no choice, all my cable-company-required DVRs were just shit that rebooted in the middle of shows.