The statistics are out for the biggest cable TV and data providers for the first quarter of the year and they show an industry that is still undergoing big changes. Broadband keeps growing and cable TV is starting to take some serious hits.
Perhaps the most relevant statistic of all is that there are now more broadband customers in the country than cable TV customers. The crossover happened sometime during the last quarter. This happened a little sooner than predicted due to plunging cable subscribers.
For the quarter the cable companies continued to clobber the telcos in terms of broadband customers. Led by big growth in broadband customers at Comcast and Charter the cable companies collectively added a little over 1 million new broadband customers for the quarter. Charter led the growth with 458,000 new broadband subscribers with Comcast a close second at 430,000 new customers.
Led by Frontier’s loss of 107,000 broadband customers for the quarter the telcos collectively lost 45,000 net customers for the quarter. Most of Frontier’s losses stem from the botched acquisition of Verizon FiOS properties. Verizon lost 27,000 customers for the quarter while AT&T U-verse was the only success among telcos adding 90,000 new customers for the quarter.
Looking back over the last year the telcos together lost 727,000 broadband customers while the cable companies together gained 3.11 million customers during the same period. The cable companies now control 63.2% of the broadband market, up from 61.5% of the market a year ago.
Overall the broadband market grew by 2.38 million new broadband subscribers for over the last year ending March 31. It’s a market controlled largely by the giant ISPs and the largest cable companies and telcos together account for 93.9 million broadband subscribers.
Cable TV shows a very different picture. The largest seven cable providers collectively lost 487,000 video subscribers for the quarter. That includes AT&T losing 233,000, Charter losing 100,000, Dish Networks losing 143,000, Verizon losing 13,000, Cox losing 4,000 and Altice losing 35,000. The only company to gain cable subscribers was Comcast, which gained 41,000.
Total industry cable subscriber losses were 762,000 for the quarter as smaller cable companies and telcos are also losing customers. That is five times larger than the industry losses of 141,000 in the first quarter of last year. This industry is now losing 2.4% of the market per year, but that r is clearly accelerating and will probably grow larger. The annual rate of decline is already significantly higher than last year’s rate of 1.8%.
At this point it’s clear that cord cutting is picking up steam and this was the worst performance ever by the industry.
The biggest losers have stories about their poor performance. Charter says it is doing better among its own historic customers but is losing a lot of customers from the Time Warner acquisition as Charter raises rates and does away with Time Warner promotional discounts. AT&T has been phasing out of cable TV over its U-Verse network. This is a DSL service that has speeds as high as 45 Mbps, but which is proving to be inadequate to carry both cable TV and broadband together. Dish Networks has been bogged down in numerous carriage and retransmission fights with programmers and has had a number of channels taken off the air.
But even considering all of these stories it’s clear that customers are leaving the big companies. Surveys of cord cutters show that very few of them come back to traditional cable after cutting the cord after they get used to getting programming in a different way.
What is probably most strikingly different about the numbers is that for years the first quarter has performed the best for the cable industry, which in recent years has still seen customer gains even while other quarters were trending downward. We’ll have to see what this terrible first quarter means for the rest of 2017.