These kinds of forecasts have always intrigued me. I doubt that there is anybody in the industry that doesn’t think that cord cutting won’t keep growing or that the market for services like Netflix won’t keep growing. What I find most interesting about these total-market forecasts is the specificity of the predictions, such as when Kagan predicts the 40.8 million number of broadband-only homes. I suspect if we did deeper into what Kagan says that they have probably predicted a range of possible future outcomes and were not that specific. But I also understand that sometimes putting a number on things is the best way to make a point in a press release.
What I’ve always found interesting about future predictions is how hard it is to predict where a whole industry is going. If I look back ten years I could find a dozen experts predicting the death of traditional landline telephones, and yet not one of them would have believed that by 2019 that landline penetration rates would still be around 40%. I imagine every one of them would have bet against that possibility. It’s easy to understand the trajectory of an industry, but it’s another thing to predict specifically where an industry will land in the future. It wasn’t hard ten years ago to predict the trajectory of the landline business, but it was nearly impossible to know how many landlines would still be around after ten years.
That doesn’t mean that somebody doesn’t have to try to make these predictions. There are huge dollars riding on the future of every telecom industry segment. Companies that invest in these industries want outside opinions on the direction of an industry. If I was developing a new OTT product like Apple is doing, I’d want some feel for the potential of my new investment. I’d want to gather as many different predictions about the future of the OTT market as possible. The above two predictions were announced publicly, but corporations regularly pay for private market assessments that never see the light of day.
To show how hard it is to make such predictions, I want to look a little more closely at the Kagan prediction. They are predicting that in five years there will be 17.5 million more homes that buy broadband and don’t buy a traditional TV product. There a number of factors and trends that would feed into that number:
- It looks like first-time households of millennials and generation Z don’t subscribe to cable TV at nearly the same levels as their parents. Some portion of the increase in broadband-only homes will come from these new households.
- While final numbers are still not in for 2018 it appears that there will be around 2 million homes that cut the cord last year and dropped cable TV. Is the future pace of cord cutting going to be faster, slow or stay the same? Obviously, predicting the future of cord cutting is a huge piece of the prediction.
- It’s becoming a lot more complicated for a household to replace traditional cable. It looks like every major owner of content wants to put their unique content into a separate OTT service like CBS All Access did with the Star Trek franchise. The cost of subscribing to multiple OTT services is already getting expensive and is likely to get even costlier over time. Surveys have shown that households cut the cord to save money, so how will cord cutting be impacted if there are no savings from cutting the cord?
- The big cable companies are creating new video products aimed at keeping subscribers. For instance, Comcast is bundling in Netflix and other OTT products and is also rolling out smaller and cheaper bundles of traditional programming. They are also allowing customers to view the content on any device, so buying a small bundle from Comcast doesn’t feel much different to the consumer than buying Sling TV. What impact will these countermeasures from the cable companies have on cord cutting?
I’m sure there are other factors that go into predicting the number of future homes without traditional cable TV and these few popped into my mind. I know that companies like Kagan and Parks have detailed current statistics on the industry that are not available to most of us. But statistics only take you so far, and anybody looking out past the end of 2019 is entering crystal ball territory. Five years is forever in a market that is as dynamic as cable TV and OTT content.
We aso know from past experience that there will be big changes in these industries that will change the paridigm. For example, the content owners might all decide that there is no profit in the OTT market and could kill their own OTT products and cause an OTT market contraction. Or a new entrant like Apple might become a major new competitor for Netflix and the demand for OTT services might explode even faster than expected. I don’t know how any prediction can anticipate big market events that might disrupt the whole industry.
Understand that I am not busting on these two predictions – I don’t know enough to have the slightest idea if these predictions are good are bad. These companies are paid to make their best guess and I’m glad that there are firms that do that. For example, Cisco has been making predictions annually for many years about the trajectory of broadband usage and that information is a valuable piece of the puzzle for a network engineer designing a new network. However, predicting how all of the different trends that affect video subscriptions over five years sounds like an unsolvable puzzle. Maybe if I’m still writing this blog five years from now I can check to see how these predictions fared. One thing I know is that I’m not ready to take any five-year forecast of the cable industry to the bank.