U.S Cable TV Companies Quietly Bled Another 785,000 Paying Customers Last Quarter
from the couldn't-have-happened-to-a-nicer-fella dept
The “cord cutting” phenomenon the cable and broadcast sector long denied or downplayed simply shows no sign of slowing down. According to the latest data by Leichtman Research, the top U.S. pay TV companies lost another 785,000 subscribers last quarter as younger Americans continue to shift to streaming video, over the air antennas, or free services like TikTok and YouTube.
While alternative pay TV services (streaming on demand and live streaming) services saw a 701,000 subscriber jump during the third quarter, traditional cable companies lost an estimated 981,674 subscribers depart for greener pastures. Phone companies (AT&T, Verizon) and traditional satellite TV companies (DirecTV, Dish) lost 701,000 paying subscribers during the quarter.
Leichtman’s analysis never really answers why consumers continue to flee traditional cable (high prices, bloated channel bundles, bullshit fees, comically terrible customer service), instead only focusing on the fact that this was the third best quarter for streaming services in history:
“Spurred by a strong quarter from Internet-delivered vMVPD services, pay-TV net losses of about 785,000 in 3Q 2022 were more modest than in the first two quarters of the year,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc. “Not including YouTube TV, which does not regularly report subscriber totals, vMVPDs had nearly 900,000 net additions in the quarter. This was the third most quarterly net adds ever for the top publicly reporting vMVPD services.”
Things are particularly tricky for companies like Comcast and Charter. Generally speaking, their monopoly over broadband access across vast swaths of the country (83 million Americans live under a broadband monopoly) means they can simply recoup their losses by charging captive broadband subscribers more money. Usually this is done via bullshit broadband fees and bullshit bandwidth usage caps.
But both companies are starting to see a small but meaningful surge in competitive threats coming mainly from two fronts: publicly-owned utilities, cooperatives, and municipalities buoyed by $50 billion in looming COVID relief and infrastructure broadband funding, and wireless companies selling fixed home 5G service.
Neither competitive threat is quite large enough to yet drive wholesale change in the uncompetitive broadband industry, but it’s just enough to make recouping losses on the video side just a bit more annoying for everybody’s favorite, deeply entrenched, government-coddled, natural monopolies.
Filed Under: cable, cable tv, competition, cord cutting, customer service, prices, streaming, video
Comments on “U.S Cable TV Companies Quietly Bled Another 785,000 Paying Customers Last Quarter”
captive broadband subscribers
An easy first step should be eliminating franchises.
Municipalities housing developments and apartment buildings sell franchises, which eliminates all choice and competition. This forces citizens to use the provider that won the bidding (and kick backs?). Even if they can use Dish, there are usually odious restrictions on the antennas.
As always – follow the money.
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Do you mean for TV? The idea of using satellite internet access in an area dense enough to have apartment buildings is absurd, and Dish in particular has terrible latency (compared to Starlink for example, though it’s not clear Starlink could work with the limited sky view that comes from having a terminal on a balcony). Fixed ground-based wireless or 5G might be options, though the providers have a history of anti-consumer behavior such as caps.
Anyway, the FCC already bans “odious” landlord restrictions on antennas: “Restrictions that prevent or delay installation, maintenance or use of antennas covered by the rule are prohibited. For example, in most cases, requirements to get approval before installing an antenna are prohibited. […] If there is a conflict about a restriction’s validity, the association, landlord or local government trying to enforce the restriction must prove it is valid.”
What ever happened to making them pay?
Techdirt has repeatedly noted that many Americans have no realistic broadband-internet option other than than their local cable monopoly. 15 years ago, when they still had some competition (DSL) for internet and little popular competition for TV, these monopolies basically forced people to subscribe to cable TV to get cable internet. (If not an actual requirement, they made sure one couldn’t save money by refusing the TV.)
Why did that ever change? Their competitors have basically willed themselves into irrelevance, I don’t recall any regulator ever caring about such bundling, and cable companies seem content with having the official “worst customer service in America”. It seems like they’d be more able than ever to get away with it.
It’s also all the commercials. Streaming on demand with no, or relatively few, commercials makes going back to the typical cable or broadcast experience an excruciating exercise.
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The “on demand” is probably about as important as the lack of commercials. Scheduled linear TV basically needs some kind of regular break, to allow people to use the toilet (at least if they want the older crowds to watch). That’s if we ignore DVRs, which we should, because DVRs are a hack revealing the stupidity of scheduled broadcasts as a transmission method. Once you’ve got an internet connection and a computer that can store and play MPEG video, it should be obvious there’s no reason to make people plan ahead and then wait till whatever they want to watch gets aired.
The Internet is the Old Television. How times change
Media habits change. Even the technology natives moved past cable long ago, with broadband ISP’s tacking on invisible fees by selling subscriber data causing another shift in content consumption.
Storage changes the whole equation, with many smartphones capable of 1TB of storage (sdcard), portable laptops capable of 8TB/15TB (highend ssd) and mini-pc’s/carputers capable of 20TB/22TB capacities in 2022.
Using modern innovation, data is not limited to broadband ISP’s. Even high-density areas could be serviced with offline kiosks capable of providing content-on-the-go just as easily as the same offline kiosks could service low-density rural.
OTA DTV mixed with offline content portals may satisfy certain generations, cultures and lifestyles without the need to stay abreast of the limited trickle of mainstream media (they seem to be stuck respinning movies/shows/plots from decades ago).
It does not change anything with the option(s) of subscribing to an ISP/mobile carrier and enjoying streaming services either.
If you were raised on “state of the art”, you are aware of all of the cool innovation to enjoy outside of the Internet.
Offline content portals are the new information hubs. Everybody is doing it (the placebo effect hype still works 🙂
Satellite replication to offline content portals offers modern flexibility on location and saves tons of bandwidth too.
With the popularity of “Goncharov”, you may be able to negotiate better rates on broadband by going from cord-cutter to offline-portal consumption and an unlimited dialtone/SMS service.
Buzzwords are easy. Many content creators could make their licensing offline-portal approved, so the Internet could be used to facilitate data transfers only to keep fresh content on all of the information hubs.
Not everyone is stuck in a monopoly with inferior regulation.
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So… your proposal is to return to a day when people used their phones for talking, and met at copy-parties to exchange data?
Oh, so just the inconvenient parts of a copy-party. Plus additional legal encumberances, and we’d get to fund the MAFIAA’s efforts to maintain these encumberances.
Would anyone who grew up with Napster or BitTorrent, or even Youtube, really want to return to those days?
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I’m saying that a data network is just storage 🙂
The library is an easy example of offline content.
Wi-Fi 6 and 6E are not just for Internet browsing. Speeds are more than capable of of transfering months of content in mere minutes.
Wikipedia for exampoe was a size of only 21.23 GB as of September 2022. Just having a 1TB smartphone makes such a small percentage.
Going back to the year 2000, 512 MB was huge.
Wasted resources are a thing of the past 🙂
Re: Re: Re:
You are overlooking an important attributes of the Internet, notification of new things via various means, and searchability of multiple archives and sources, including those that the searcher is unaware of. Links are also an online advantage that does not translate to offline sources, where only a reference and not a direct link to content, is possible.
The content of the Internet is more than any one local archive can hold, and is at everybodies fingertips, and is continually expanding at a rate that local archives cannot keep up with, like, the last I saw, YouTube was growing at 500 hours of videos a minute, and that is just one video site.
Re: Re: Re:2
Not to make a fud sandwich, but google did just quote that the Internet had a 60% duplicate ratio.
I also mentioned that it “may satisfy certain generations, cultures and lifestyles”.
It was also an offhand comment stating that only having monopoly ISP’s is not a limiting factor in 2022, unless you have online habits that require that kind of connectivity. Cord-cutting happened… Many also dropped copper line telcos. Technology did not stand still 🙂
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I’m all for using offline transfers when necessary, but this is 2022:
* as bad as monopolistic ISPs are, they aren’t quite that bad in most areas; if you want to “stick it to them” out of principle, and it’s not going to cost thousands of dollars to sign up, share a connection and cost between some neighbors
* “the library” should look a lot like archive.org, but without the DRM they put on some books or anything resembling “licensing portals”; the building known as a library should provide a way to put parts of the digital library onto ordinary USB devices
Re: Re: Re:2
The digital divide looks like its 60% duplicate sites, tabloid quality content abound, irrelevant ads (just like old TV) and archaic ISP’s.
Its easy to know if you landed on the wrong side of that divide 🙂
Re: Whuh?
A bit tech salesman jargon-y, but fill me in. What are “offline content portals”, and how does the a feeble meme “goncharov” influence their ascendancy?
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An evolution of cord cutting 🙂
Even as placebo-hype, it is a modern meme :p
It makes it easy to negotiate better rates when there is competition 🙂
Minus 3/4 of a million will ease congestion significantly.
Think of the relief that the loss of 3/4 of a million subscribers will bring to those that are capped or otherwise hamstrung by congested networks, this is a huge win.
Comcast owns NBC and Universal. While Peacock isn’t doing so well, I have bought a subscription to them to watch the Pitch Black movie that came out 23 years ago as well as the new original series Rutherford Falls, after which I’ll cancel my subscription until or unless the show picks up for a third season.
subscribers 0
Very bad for them, they are very short with money now.