Comcast Lost 12% Of Its Cable TV Customers In The Last Year Alone
from the couldn't-have-happened-to-a-nicer-company dept
Cable executives spent years denying that “cord cutting” (ditching traditional TV) was real. For years they insisted it was a “fiction,” or that it was a fad that would end once Millennials started procreating. Whatever gave them permission to not meaningfully evolve their often predatory, anti-competitive business strategies.
Yeah, about that.
Major cable companies continue to bleed traditional cable TV users at an amazing rate. Last May, the whole industry reported the fewest traditional pay TV subscribers since 1992, as younger audiences flock toward streaming, over the air broadcasts, YouTube, or TikTok.
Last quarter was particularly ugly for Comcast, which lost 520,000 pay TV subs during a single quarter, and 12.6 percent of its video subscribers over the last year. The company now has 14.98 million video customers and dropping, and will soon be replaced by Charter Spectrum (which also lost 241,000 customers that same quarter) as the biggest traditional cable company in the U.S.
It’s now estimated that 8,164 customers are cancelling cable TV every day.
Comcast did manage to add 2 million paid subscribers to its Peacock streaming service (Mrs. Davis is a phenomenal show, by the way) and now has 24 million total. Granted those users pay significantly less money a month than traditional cable TV users. And Peacock has generally been a money loser; it saw $651 million in losses during 2Q 2023, compared to a $467 million loss in Q2, 2022.
Traditionally, Comcast recoups its TV losses on the broadband side, where it holds a monopoly over internet access across much of the United States. But things are shaky there as well, as Comcast is finally seeing some increased competition mostly thanks to fixed 5G wireless networks, and the kind of creative, community-owned broadband networks popping up all over the United States.
Some phone companies have also, thirty years late, started upgrading more DSL users to fiber. As a result, Comcast also lost 19,000 broadband subscribers during the same quarter.
Comcast did manage to add 315,000 wireless customers, but Comcast’s “wireless network” primarily leases access from Verizon, and isn’t going to be anywhere close to the same kind of money maker bloated, expensive cable TV bundles used to be.
This is all rough sledding for a company that successfully lobbied to defang all regulators and competition over a thirty year span (they were a key player in the sleazy smear campaign that derailed Gigi Sohn’s nomination to the FCC), yet now finds itself scrambling for relevance anyway. Add the broader writers’ strike to the mix, and Comcast/NBC’s future looks cloudier still.
And while Comcast will be getting a huge chunk of the more than $45 billion in broadband subsidies included in the infrastructure bill, so will a lot of the municipalities, cooperatives, city-owned utilities, and other locally-owned broadband networks spawned from the monopoly’s apathy.
Filed Under: cable tv, competition, cord cutting, disruption, gigi sohn, regulation, streaming, video
Comments on “Comcast Lost 12% Of Its Cable TV Customers In The Last Year Alone”
Turning on themselves
At some point the stock market’s insatiable desire for exponential growth is going to require that Comcast do something about carriage fees. When that happens, the parasites will start to look at each other. When Comcast and News Corp. turn on one another the media landscape will dramatically change.
Re: the media landscape has already dramatically changed
Does anyone actually subscribe to cable anymore? I know one very old family member who does. Cable and Fox News are reaching an audience that will be dead within few years anyway.
Re: Re:
If one lives in an apartment complex or “townhome” or condo, very likely you are forced to pay (to the property, not the cable company) a cable bill despite your personal objections to it, no matter how vehement. The previous HOA tried to pass a regulation requiring cable and paid through HOA fees. They tried the same thing with lawn care too.
Re: Re: Re:
That varies a lot by area. Locally, I checked 2800 saved real estate listings, and see only 4 condominium complexes that include cable TV in the fees. That’s compared to about 40 that include electricity or 200 (almost all) that include water, for example. So not “very likely”. And most townhouses are freehold here, with no “HOA” or condo board that can force it.
My 90-year-old grandmother willingly subscribes to cable TV—mostly to watch the weather channel (which I don’t think Netflix has), the local news, and a few game shows. My 65-year-old parents subscribe, but have considered cancelling and probably would if the cable company ever refused to renew their “temporary” bundle discount (with phone and internet). And if my mother weren’t obsessed with HGTV, which a co-worker tells me is also the only thing keeping their household subscribed. (For those who don’t know, that’s a dangerous channel that convinces people they need to spend tens of thousands of dollars to “update” homes that have nothing wrong with them.)
The next below the line charge will be a ‘you have cable subscription fee’ which just happens to be the same as the most expensive cable bundle.
Re:
From personal experience: Comcast internet without cable is more expensive than internet with cable.
Re: Re:
Somewhat true. COMCAST will sell you a bundle at a reduced price so the cost of the bundle with cable is cheaper than just internet. But that is for a limited time and after that time, the price increases after that limited time.
Re: Re:
Curious to know when your experience is from. That was true a few years back – though not really when the broadcast TV fee was added in. Now if you take video with internet you do get a “multi product discount” like a traditional bundle, but the total is still more than if you just take internet. It use to be burger (internet) = $4, fries (tv) = $3… burger + fries together is $3. Now it’s burger + fries together is $5.
Re: Re: Re:
Comcast in the bay area for me. Just redid my services. eliminating the most basic cable package would have cost me $10/mo more than switching to a compareable internet only service.
Re: Re: Re:2 I dont watch TV
Comcast is charging 10 times more for internet than it costs them to provide. On top of that is a penalty for not bundling: Those who only want internet service are punished because Comcast assumes that you must be getting TV from someone over the internet, and wants to get a piece of the action. This is racketeering, of course. So long as this predatory pricing is allowed, it’s all the proof you need that the politicians and bureaucrats are bought and paid for.
The kind of regulation that we need here is a prohibition on so-called “bundle discounts” (which are are actually fines & penalties for comparison shopping on individual services.)
Package pricing is anti-competitive when there is no identical alternative service (e.g. coaxial cable) from another provider. A monopoly that over-exploits public property in this fashion can and should be subject to regulation.
Community TV
Comcast pays a percentage to community TV stations here in VT, based on subscribers, to maintain a cable monopoly. Also helps with technical issues and equipment.
Broadband doesn’t figure into the community TV portion. If cable TV goes away, so might local community cable.
Re:
Bring out the receipts, please. IOW, no, community broadband isn’t going away any time soon. The community itself has a far greater interest in seeing it survive, and will go to much greater lengths than Comcast’s piddling “contribution” ever helped in funding that C.B. You can take that to the bank.
Re: Re:
The comment you replied to is about TV stations and has nothing to do with community broadband. Has any community broadband project ever run cable? Even my local cable monopoly hasn’t run cable for a decade or two, excepting repairs—it’s all fibre now. I’m not aware of a community broadband project ever funding a public-access TV studio, although that’s one obvious way to keep such things going.
Re:
…and? Is that important? I mean that as a serious question; to me, community (public-access) cable was never more than an origin of weird shows—Wayne’s World, The Tom Green Show, etc.—and maybe religious broadcasts. I don’t know anyone who ever watched it, and I assume all such things are distributed online now, probably on Youtube.
Was it something that people took seriously in the past, or still do in certain areas? For example, did/does it have any important journalistic roles? (But haven’t such stations been “dying” on about the same timeline as local news broadcasts anyway?)
Re: Re: there's this new thing called the internet...
Plus, why can’t all that local news just be on you know the internet? What exactly are they doing that requires cable? Other than that they reach an audience that doesn’t know how to use the internet?
Re: Re: Re:
It’s about the money, not the distribution. Major cities often have a community-access TV studio funded by the local monopoly. An actual building with professional cameras, sets, green screens, employees, etc. The hypothetical Wayne and Garth can just show up and apply for some airtime, and don’t have to know anything about video production. The resulting shows are broadcast on the cable network, but for quite a while have often been put online too (as a station simulcast and/or as individual episodes).
There’s a view that all this stuff can be replaced by a cellphone camera, or a cheap(ish) digital camera. I’m not sure how true that is, but certainly the average person can do a lot that would’ve been difficult 30 years ago without a professional studio. Stuff like city and church meetings never even needed a studio, and many of those are now online independent of the community stations. So the role of these stations is diminishing, but I think the previous poster was right to point out that we might be losing something of value.
Re: Re: Re:
News is one thing, but Comcast and their ilk buy exclusive rights to televise sports.
Seeing the English Premier League (EPL) was my main reason to get Comcast (which also owns NBC and Peacock).
No Comcast no EPL.
With them moving much of it to Peacock, I’m on my last Comcast contract.
Re:
If Comcast was granted a monopoly just for the cost of maintaining a public access studio, I would say they got an unbelievably fantastic, one-sided deal that amounts to robbery, and constitutes an “unconscionable contract”: It’s essentially a conspiracy between city officials and the cable cartel to commit extortion against the public. I think that could be renegotiated.
It absolutely freaking does when the price of our internet service is subsidizing the company’s TV service — and that is precisely what’s happening if you have to pay more for internet when you refuse the bundle. Comcast is still making a hefty profit on the lifeline / ACP service and that service tier should be available to anyone who wants it. But they won’t sell you any speed that costs less than $50 per month if they have no competition. That’s just racketeering.
So what?! Public Access TV was intended to solve a problem which is now solved by the internet. You can produce an entire show on your phone with the editing tools we have today, and multiple providers will host it for free. If that is the only thing which stands in the way of competition and you continue to defend it, you’re a friend of the robber barons, and an enemy of the people.
Why doesn’t your local cable monopoly support multicasting? Because anyone on that municipal network could broadcast a video feed from their home to every subscriber, and then the public access studio would not be needed, and then it could not be used to justify an abusive monopoly.
My mother in-law asked me how to use to streaming services I use, because she’s fed up of paying the ridiculous high prices of cable tv. Now she uses Disney, crave, fuboTV, Prime, starz, and loves it.
Re:
Introduce her to the freecasters — Pluto, Tubi, Crackle, Freevee, etc. — and see what she thinks.
Do Cable Companies Make Money on Cable TV
Do cable companies still make a lot of money on cable TV? With all the carriage fees and must carry channels, I thought cable tv wasn’t the big money maker it once was. It was the content providers who have the power. Want to offer customers ESPN? It’s $7.00 per month per subscribers, and must be offered on the base tier. CBS and Fox have long admitted that they make more money with must carry fees paid by cable providers than from broadcast advertisers.
The biggest money maker for cable tv providers was plain Internet service — especially upgrading customers to faster speeds.
Not that I like cable companies. I’ve been waiting two decades to be able to get rid of my carrier. I dropped TV and phone service 20 years ago, but to stream, I need an internet connection and my cable company has a monopoly. DSL? 3Mbps. 5G? Both Verizon and T-Mobile offer it in my town, but I’m in a 5G dead zone.
The big loser in cord cutting is currently Disney (ESPN) which is watching its revenue drop as people cut cable. They’re literally losing $7 per month for each person who cuts the cord. (1800 new cord cutters each month? That’s $12,500 in lower revenue each and every month. No wonder Disney wants to fob it off.
Re:
No, it is not literally “losing money” to have one revenue stream decrease. And that’s just ESPN, anyway. Disney’s got their own streaming service with more than 150 million subscribers—nevermind the films, theme parks, and the rest.
When they said that in 2015, the oldest “millenials” were in their mid-30s—already pretty late to start procreating. It’s early-to-mid-40s now…
keep going Comcrap
Lose all your cable customers and then your broadband customers when competition allows. If any company deserves oblivion, it’s Comcrap. Throw AT&T in the pit right after them.
It is only a matter of time before Comcast decides it is time for direct action and starts physically sabotaging these community-owned broadband networks to reestablish their local monopoly. They have done it before.
the guy who killed his parents
I am locked into a Comcast bloated, expensive cable TV bundle because they have no cable competition.
Many/most municipalities and housing developments sell Comcast and their ilk exclusive rights to provide cable.
Clearly they are being paid off. I strongly suspect there are surreptitious payments to individuals, also. There are certainly no benefits to these exclusives to the end-users.
Meanwhile, Comcast removes programming that was provided when I signed my contract, and showing it only on Peacock.
There is nothing I can do until my contract expires.
I have to abide by their contract, but they can change the product at will.
Then they complain that they are losing customers!!
They are like the guy who killed his parents, then asks for leniency because he’s an orphan.
No problem, the government will give them (my) money.
Ahh the result of greed. Hope you’re happy, RSNs and other lame packaged networks
Also, agree on Mrs Davis. Best show/limited series in many many years
Other polling results
Comcast has lost tv customers but internet retention is strong.
The new triple play of phone, cell, internet appears to be growing.
For better or worse, people are dumping Tav but not much else.