You can’t read an article about the cable industry without hearing about the erosion of customers due to cord cutting. So I thought I would take a look at the cable customers claimed by the largest cable companies at the end of the second quarters of 2016 and 2017.
| 2Q 2016 | 2Q 2017 | Change | ||
| Comcast | 22,396,000 | 22,516,000 | 120,000 | 0.5% |
| DirecTV | 20,454,000 | 20,856,000 | 402,000 | 2.0% |
| Charter | 17,312,000 | 17,071,000 | (241,000) | -1.4% |
| Dish | 13,593,000 | 11,892,000 | (1,701,000) | -12.5% |
| AT&T | 4,869,000 | 4,666,000 | (203,000) | -4.2% |
| Verizon | 4,637,000 | 3,853,000 | (784,000) | -16.9% |
| Cox | 4,330,000 | 4,245,000 | (85,000) | -2.0% |
| Altice | 3,639,000 | 3,463,000 | (176,000) | -4.8% |
| Frontier | 1,340,000 | 1,007,000 | (333,000) | -24.9% |
| Mediacom | 842,000 | 829,000 | (13,000) | -1.5% |
| WOW | 524,300 | 458,200 | (66,100) | -12.6% |
| Cable ONE | 338,974 | 297,990 | (40,984) | -12.1% |
| 94,275,274 | 91,154,190 | (3,121,084) | -3.3% |
These companies represent more than 95% of the whole TV market. According to Leichtman Research these companies together lost around 655,000 cable customers in the second quarter of this year.
What’s most striking about the above table is that the companies in aggregate lost 3.3% or over 3.1 million customers in the last year. One has to only go back two years to see the first instance of the industry losing customers, so these losses are recent. This is reminiscent to me to what happened to telephone landlines. The losses started very slowly, but then the rate of the decline picked up year after year. There is no way to know if cable will take the same path or if the drop in customers will be slower. But I think everybody in the industry from programmers to Wall Street is concerned about losses of this magnitude.
Interestingly, for now the big cable companies are largely maintaining earnings due to rate increases for the remaining cable customers plus continued growth in broadband customers. I’ll have a blog next week looking at the state of broadband.
There are a few interesting things to note in these numbers:
- The losses in the second quarter of 2017 are actually smaller than the losses from that same quarter of 2016. But the year-over-year losses are significantly more now than they were in the year ending with 2Q 2016.
- Satellite TV is getting clobbered. While DirecTV is higher, it’s offset to some extent by the loss of customers at parent AT&T which is shifting customers to the satellite platform. Dish networks is the big loser. Much of their customer losses have been offset by Sling TV adding over a million customers during the last year. But it’s rumored in the industry that Sling TV is operating at almost no margin.
- Comcast continues to buck the rest of the industry and saw a tiny gain of customers over the last year.
- When looking at these numbers you always must remember that the industry lost customers while there were around 1.5 million new residential living units build last year (homes and apartments). The gains that these companies got from those new homes, probably at least 1 million new customers is masked by the other losses, meaning that the industry lost over 4 million customers during the last year.
- We know that the cable companies are continuing to take broadband customers from the telcos and there has to be some of that going on in these numbers.