Leichtman Research Group recently released the cable customer counts for the largest providers of traditional cable service at the end of the second quarter of 2022. LRG compiles most of these numbers from the statistics provided to stockholders, except for Cox, which is privately held and estimated. Leichtman says this group of companies represents 96% of all traditional U.S. cable customers.
The traditional cable providers continue to lose customers at a torrid pace, losing over 1.65 million customers in the second quarter, up from 1.4 million customers the previous quarter. Overall, the traditional cable providers lost almost 18,200 customers every day during the quarter.
The big news for the quarter is that traditional cable providers are now in less than half of homes and have collectively dropped to a 49% market penetration. The industry has lost almost seventeen million customers since the end of 2017, when traditional cable was in over 73% of homes.
| 2Q 2022 | Change | Change | |
| Comcast | 17,144,000 | (520,000) | -2.9% |
| Charter | 15,495,000 | (226,000) | -1.4% |
| DirecTV | 13,900,000 | (400,000) | -2.8% |
| Dish Network | 7,791,000 | (202,000) | -2.5% |
| Verizon | 3,479,000 | (87,000) | -2.4% |
| Cox | 3,230,000 | (80,000) | -2.4% |
| Altice | 2,574,200 | (84,500) | -3.2% |
| Mediacom | 540,000 | (15,000) | -2.7% |
| Frontier | 343,000 | (20,000) | -5.5% |
| Breezeline | 332,312 | (6,709) | -2.0% |
| Cable ONE | 221,000 | (17,000) | -7.1% |
| Total | 65,049,512 | (1,658,209) | -2.5% |
| Hulu Live | 4,000,000 | (100,000) | -2.4% |
| Sling TV | 2,197,000 | (55,000) | -2.4% |
| FuboTV | 946,735 | (109,510) | -10.4% |
| Total Cable | 39,536,512 | (949,209) | -2.3% |
| Total Telco / Satellite | 25,513,000 | (709,000) | -2.7% |
| Total vMvPD | 7,143,735 | (264,510) | -3.6% |
It doesn’t look like people are replacing traditional cable with an online alternative like Hulu and Sling TV – which collectively lost 264,000 customers in the quarter. A few major online alternatives like YouTube TV aren’t on the list, but the loss in traditional cable far surpasses any possible net gain for the online cable alternatives.
Charter is still losing customers at a slower rate than everybody else in the industry and has for the past several years – although Charter’s losses are starting to climb. Charter CEO Tom Rutledge 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.
The biggest percentage losers continue to be Frontier and Cable ONE.