In 2021, almost 4.7 million people elected to cancel their cable or satellite pay-TV services, accounting for 5.8% of the total subscriber base. According to Leichtman Research Group, the top cable or satellite TV providers today have around 76.1 million overall subscribers.
LRG polled providers who account for roughly 93 percent of the overall cable and satellite market. According to the survey, last year’s losses were comparable to the previous year, when providers lost roughly 4.9 million members.
Do the majority of Americans have access to cable television?
In 1948, cable television became available in the United States for the first time. By 1989, 53 million American households had subscribed to cable television, with 60 percent of all American households having done so by 1992. with According to SNL Kagan data, around 58.4 percent of all American homes subscribed to basic cable television services in 2006. The majority of cable viewers in the United States are middle-class and live in the suburbs; cable television is less frequent in low-income, urban, and rural areas.
How many people in the United States have cable?
There were 90.3 million PA (Cable/Satellite) TV subscribers in the United States in 2018, however that number has dropped to 86.5 million this year. In 2020, this number is predicted to fall even lower, to 82.9 million homes.
The number of homes that have cut the cord is expanding at a similar rate. In 2018, 36 million homes did not have access to pay television. This number has continuously risen to 40.2 million in 2019 and is expected to reach 44.3 million by 2020.
It’s crucial to note that just because a family does not have pay television does not indicate they are cord cutters. As more Millennials enter the workforce, they are dubbed “Cord Nevers” because they do not see the value in spending more than $123 a month for cable. A cord cutter is someone who used to pay for television but now avoids it in favor of less expensive and/or more user-friendly alternatives such as streaming or using a DTV antenna.
Are Cord Cutters Missing Anything?
The vast majority of people Cord cutters said they don’t miss their former cable or satellite TV, with 52% saying they don’t miss it at all. Live events (23 percent), local and national news (22 percent), and sports were the most common things they missed (19 percent ).
Is there still a demand for cable television?
In 2014, cable’s client base began to dwindle, with the industry losing just over 100,000 subscribers. The numbers climbed steadily above one million in 2017, then doubled in 2018, then doubled again in 2019, before stabilizing at roughly 4.6 to 4.9 million users per year.
How many people are abandoning cable in favor of streaming?
Cable TV providers have lost millions of consumers as a result of cord-cutting, which they can’t manage to reclaim. In reality, from 2019 to 2021, traditional pay-TV providers lost about 6 million users per year.
Since 2012, major US cable and satellite TV providers have lost 25 million subscribers, with another 25 million expected to leave by 2025. However, most cord-cutters aren’t simply abandoning live TV in favor of all on-demand content. Sling TV, YouTube TV, fuboTV, and Hulu + Live TV are among the most popular all-digital live TV streaming services.
The following are the largest traditional cable TV companies that are losing subscribers:
- In the third quarter of 2021, Comcast has 18.55 million TV customers. The company’s pay-TV customer counts fell below 19 million by the end of 2020. That number was 21.9 million at the end of 2018. In 2017, the corporation had 22.3 million video consumers at the end of the year. Comcast has been losing cable TV customers every year, as we can see.
- Verizon: Since the fourth quarter of 2016, the company’s subscriber counts have been declining. In 2021, the firm lost roughly 281,000 cable television subscribers.
- Charter: Every year, this company loses tens of thousands of video consumers. Higher carriage fees imposed by programmers, according to its CEO, are a major driver of users switching to cord-cutting services. In the fourth quarter of 2021, Charter lost 58,000 pay-TV subscribers. This follows a trend from the previous year, when the firm lost around 66,000 pay-TV subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2020.
- DirecTV (satellite): This AT&T-owned satellite TV provider lost 473,000 subscribers in Q2 2021, down from an 887,000-subscriber drop the previous quarter. Between 2017 and 2019, the corporation lost over 2.3 million satellite TV subscribers. In 2020, the firm lost nearly 3 million DirecTV subscribers, which was a very disastrous year for the corporation.
- Dish Network: In 2021, the second-largest cable TV provider in the United States witnessed a drop in consumer share. In Q4 2021, Dish Network lost 273,000 net pay-TV subscribers, compared to 133,000 in the previous quarter.
For the time being, the bloodletting is set to continue unabated. Even Comcast, which has certainly lost the most cable TV subscribers of all the companies, is pessimistic about its pay-TV prospects. This year, the business forecasts that even more customers will cancel their standard cable TV subscriptions.
However, many Americans continue to use both regular television and cord-cutting services. In 2019, 43% of Americans had both pay-TV and SVOD (streaming video-on-demand) subscriptions.
Why are people cutting the cord?
People used to cut the cord on their cable TV bundles in order to save money by going all-in on streaming. It was the cost of an expensive cable TV package vs the low monthly cost of Netflix (which has ticked steadily upward in recent years).
Then, gradually but steadily, many of us began to add subscriptions to services like Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV+, Peacock, and others, to the point where it became more expensive to cut the cord and get your entertainment fix from streaming TV options.
In fact, according to Versus Reviews, people in more than half of the United States (37 states to be exact) spend more on streaming than they do on cable (or, in many cases, do not spend). It’s usually not much, with streaming only costing a few dollars more per month than cable in many areas, but here’s the point: How bad has an industry gone to the point where consumers are willing to pay more in the future to get rid of it?
Is satellite television still in vogue?
Satellite TV has fallen even more in recent years as cord-cutting has increased. For years, DirecTV and Dish Network, the two largest satellite carriers, have been progressively losing subscribers. In the first quarter of 2021, Dish Network lost another 230,000 pay-TV subscribers, with 8.69 million for Dish TV and 2.37 million for Sling TV. Even at the end of 2020, Dish hiked its prices.
What percentage of homes have a television?
Television is one of the most widely used forms of mass media in the United States. As of August 2013, 96.7 percent of American households owned at least one television set, with roughly 114,200,000 households possessing at least one television set. The vast majority of homes have multiple sets. With 98.4 percent of households having at least one television set, the 1996-97 season saw the highest percentage of households with at least one television set.
The television networks that broadcast in the United States are the world’s largest and most widely distributed, and shows created expressly for US-based networks are the most frequently syndicated globally. Many critics have claimed that American television entered a modern golden age around the beginning of the twenty-first century, based on a recent surge in the number and popularity of critically acclaimed television series during the 2000s and 2010s to date; whether that golden age has ended or is continuing in the early 2020s is debatable.
Is it true that streaming is more popular than cable?
- Half of those who say they solely watch cable TV are over the age of 60.
- Over a quarter (22%) of 18-29 year olds watch both cable TV and streaming services, and 31% of 18-29 year olds watch both.
- 16 percent of people choose to watch satellite television (Dish Network, DirecTV, etc).
- Streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, iTunes, and Hulu are used by just over 10% of the population.
- It makes a difference how old you are! Streaming services are preferred by more than a quarter of 18-29 year olds (27 percent ).
Is cable television losing viewers?
Leichtman Research Group’s analysis does not include two major internet bundle providers, YouTube TV and Philo, because they only reveal subscriber counts on a limited basis. Alphabet, the parent company of YouTube, announced that the service had 3 million subscribers in 2020, and many Wall Street analysts believe it is now well over 4 million. Philo is on his way to a million followers.
In 2021, losses on the cable side escalated. They lost 2.7 million subscribers this year, compared to 1.9 million in 2020.
Direct-to-consumer streaming services, particularly on the programming side, represent a new ray of hope for traditional bundle stakeholders. Broadband service has also constituted a significant new revenue stream for cable companies, particularly since Covid boosted home connectivity demand dramatically. Comcast, the largest cable company in the United States, lost about 1.7 million members in 2021, bringing its total to 18.2 million. Nonetheless, its broadband service has now reached half of the country, and it has established companies like the Flex television bundle on top of that footprint.