Cable's Continued Collapse
Lucas Manfredi
Everyone knows by now (finally – I wrote this almost a decade ago) that cable TV is in a prolonged state of decline. But the numbers (assuming these numbers are at least directionally accurate) are nevertheless sobering.
The major pay TV operators shed 5.035 million subscribers in 2023, according to an analysis by Leichtman Research Group, bringing the total net losses in the past five years to over 20 million. The firm estimates that the companies ended the year with roughly 71.3 million video customers, compared to 91.5 million at the end of 2018.
In there, both cable and satellite (and fiber) services are not only losing members, but losing more customers each year than the year before. If Leichtman's numbers are correct, here's the current state of the industry, by company and subscribers:
- Charter – 14.122 million (cable)
- Comcast – 14.106 million (cable)
- DirecTV – 11.3 million (satellite)
- Dish – 6.471 million (satellite)
- Verizon Fios – 3.012 million (fiber)
- Altice – 2.26 million (cable)
- Breezeline – 280,145 (cable)
- Frontier – 234,000 (fiber)
- Cable One – 142,300 (cable)
While all of the above (and other, smaller players) lost just over 5 million subscribers last year, the virtual cable providers continued to grow:
Meanwhile, internet-delivered pay-TV services, which include YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, Sling TV and Fubo, reported a total of 16.2 million subscribers. The virtual Multichannel Video Programming Distributors, or vMVPDs, collectively added 1.895 million subscribers in 2023, compared to a gain of 1.67 million in 2022.
If you add in the largest of these to the list above, it looks like this:1
- Charter – 14.122 million (cable)
- Comcast – 14.106 million (cable)
- DirecTV – 11.3 million (satellite)
- YouTubeTV – 8 million (vMVPD)
- Dish – 6.471 million (satellite)
- Hulu + Live TV – 4.6 million (vMVPD)
- Verizon Fios – 3.012 million (fiber)
- Altice – 2.26 million (cable)
- Sling TV – 2.055 million (vMVPD)
- Fubo – 1.618 million (vMVPD)
- Breezeline – 280,145 (cable)
- Frontier – 234,000 (fiber)
- Cable One – 142,300 (cable)
Of course, cable, just the variety that serves up internet, is still one of the key "winners" with the vMVPDs – you need pipes through which to stream. But as this collapse continues, it's going to continue to completely upend businesses that were so heavily built upon the old model. Disney, of course, thanks primarily to ESPN, which has long been the largest beneficiary of the cable model. But also the sports leagues themselves, which have gotten insane TV deals – which have only gone up as sports was clearly the only thing drawing people to watch programming live (and thus, watching ads live) and as new services spent heavily to try to grab subscribers. But this seems on the verge of shifting as well, as many of the companies that benefitted from the old system are now pulling back spending, fast.
And consolidation is happening while at the same time, new bundles are forming. It all feels a lot like the proverbial music slowing down and everyone scrambling to find a chair. But there's not just one too few chairs, there are almost no chairs.
1 And yes, it's not exactly apples-to-apples, but if you wanted to add in the pure streaming services, Netflix currently sits at over 260 million subscribers. Or roughly 200 million more subscribers than all of the above services combined. Disney+ has about 150 million subscribers, but nearly 225 million if you include Hulu and ESPN+. Amazon Prime Video has just north of 200 million. Max is just above 75 million (with Discovery+ another 25 million or so). And so on...