Make it two years running where traditional pay-TV providers have topped 3 million in video subscriber losses, as a new study – which traditionally has been conservative in reporting those numbers – reports that 3.515 million customers cut the cord in 2018, 13% more than the 3.111 million it lost last year.
Cord cutting typically has been seen as an epidemic that only U.S. pay TV operators are dealing with, reporting more than 4.4 million losses (about 5% of its market) in the past three years as its declined to about 86 million customers.
But Brazil’s pay-TV industry has suffered even more.
Just more than one-in-10 people say they intend to keep their cable subscriptions, according to a new survey of Americans who currently have, or have had, cable service.
Could second quarter pay-TV subscriber losses in the United States top 1 million, the highest figure ever? In a word, yes.
The second quarter routinely is a weak one for operators and in the current environment – remember the first quarter saw more than 800,000 subscribers cut the cord, according to Kagan – reaching one million may be an easy task.
Could this be the start of the Great Cable Channel Recession? Maybe. Esquire Network, the joint venture between NBCUniversal and Hearst that began in 2013, today announced that it’s going to the promised land – OTT – later this year.
The channel was the victim of the continued erosion of the pay-TV audience, especially male Millennials, the Esquire Network’s primary audience.
Viewing time of live TV continued to decline in Q3, albeit by only a minute in from a year ago, as viewers increasingly tune in to time-shifted TV and online video.
Nielsen said live TV viewing per day slipped to four hours and six minutes in the third quarter, a minute less than in Q3 2015, and a much smaller decrease than the six-minute drop between Q3 2014 and Q3 2015.
The extra minute went to DVR viewing, which increased to 29 minutes from 28 minutes.
U.S. operators – especially telcos – are facing a triple cord-cutting threat as subscribers are dropping their landlines, traditional pay-TV subscriptions and, increasingly, broadband plans, as consumers look to mobile as their one-source supplier.
Researcher Ovum’s World Broadband Information Service says the trend is “looming” over U.S. operators, but adds that other regions also are potentially facing disruption on all three fronts.
Pay-TV subscription declines continued at a record pace, with the industry losing an estimated 430,000 subscribers in the third quarter, bring the loss for the first 9 months of the year to 1.3 million, the most ever for the first nine months of the year.
Research firm SNL Kagan said the Q3 loss was higher than a year ago, with the telco segment hit the hardest, fueled by AT&T’s continued move to satellite delivery via DirecTV from its legacy U-verse IPTV product.
A new report says that more than four-in-10 pay-TV subscribers say they’ll either cut the cord or shave their pay-TV bill by reducing services in the next year, a number that would be downright apocalyptic for the industry.
Customers using paid streaming video services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, or, skinny bundle offerings like SlingTV and PlayStation Vue, as well as programming apps like HBO Now are significantly more satisfied compared to pay-TV service providers, a new study says.
Nearly 6% of pay-TV subscribers say they are “very likely” cutting the cord this year, 50% more than were considering it a year ago, according to a study from researcher Frank N. Magid Associates. In its annual Magid Media Futures report, the industry researcher said that among Millennials, a recognized at-risk demographic in the pay-TV industry, that number was a whopping 9%.
Here’s another reason pay-TV operators are looking longingly at virtual MVPDs (V-MVPDs): Fully a quarter of all Americans who moved this past year no longer subscribe to a pay-TV service.