Leichtman Research Group recently released the cable customer counts for the largest providers of traditional cable service at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021. LRG compiles most of these numbers from the statistics provided to stockholders other than for Cox, which is privately held and estimated. Leichtman says this group of companies represents 96% of all U.S. cable customers.
The industry continues to bleed customers, losing over 1.3 million customers in the fourth quarter. This follows similar losses in the second and third quarters and a drop of over 1.6 million customers in the first quarter of 2021. Overall, the traditional cable providers list almost 5.6 million customers for the year or a loss of 15,300 customers every day during the year.
| Annual | Annual | 4Q | 4Q | ||
| 4Q 2021 | Change | Change | Change | Change | |
| Comcast | 18,176,000 | (1,670,000) | -8.4% | (373,000) | -2.0% |
| Charter | 15,833,000 | (367,000) | -2.3% | (58,000) | -0.4% |
| AT&T / DirecTV | 14,600,000 | (1,905,000) | -11.5% | (400,000) | -2.7% |
| Dish Network | 8,221,000 | (595,000) | -6.7% | (203,000) | -2.4% |
| Verizon | 3,644,000 | (283,000) | -7.2% | (70,000) | -1.9% |
| Cox | 3,390,000 | (260,000) | -7.1% | (70,000) | -2.0% |
| Altice | 2,732,300 | (240,900) | -8.1% | (70,700) | -2.5% |
| Mediacom | 572,000 | (71,000) | -11.0% | (18,000) | -3.1% |
| Frontier | 380,000 | (105,000) | -21.6% | (20,000) | -5.0% |
| Atlantic Broadband | 346,729 | (36,271) | -9.5% | (13,271) | -3.7% |
| Cable ONE | 261,000 | (50,000) | -16.1% | (18,000) | -6.5% |
| Total | 68,156,029 | (5,583,171) | -7.6% | (1,313,971) | -1.9% |
| Hulu Live | 4,300,000 | 300,000 | 7.5% | 300,000 | 7.5% |
| Sling TV | 2,486,000 | 12,000 | 0.5% | (70,000) | -2.7% |
| FuboTV | 1,129,807 | 581,927 | 106.2% | 185,202 | 19.6% |
| Total Cable | 41,311,029 | (2,695,171) | -6.1% | (620,971) | -1.5% |
| Total Telco / Satellite | 26,845,000 | (2,888,000) | -9.7% | (693,000) | -2.5% |
| Total vMvPD | 7,915,807 | 893,927 | 12.7% | 415,202 | 5.5% |
It doesn’t look like people are replacing traditional cable with an online alternative like Hulu and Sling TV. A few major online alternatives like YouTube TV aren’t on the list, but the loss in traditional cable far surpasses the net gain for the online cable alternatives.
Charter is losing customers at a far slower rate than everybody else in the industry and has for the past several years. Charter CEO Tom Rutledge explains this by Charter’s willingness to move cable subscribers to less expensive tiers, such as the $44.99 Spectrum TV Select product. He says that Charter actively points out to customers that the online alternatives cost more. The rest of the industry seems resigned to letting cable customers go.
Great article! I would recommend adding YouTube TV as part of the analysis, as well as DIRECTV stream, Philo, and TVision. Adding those vMVPDs would likely alter the conclusion of your analysis.