The traditional cable companies lost over 6.25 million cable subscribers in 2022, up from 5.6 million in 2021. That means that almost one in every twenty homes in the country dropped traditional cable TV during the last year.
These numbers come from Leichtman Research Group, which 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.
| % 4Q | Annual | |||
| 4Q 2022 | 4Q Change | Change | Change | |
| Comcast | 16,142,000 | (440,000) | -2.7% | (2,034,000) |
| Charter | 15,147,000 | (144,000) | -0.9% | (686,000) |
| DirecTV | 13,100,000 | (400,000) | -3.0% | (1,500,000) |
| Dish TV | 7,416,000 | (191,000) | -2.5% | (805,000) |
| Verizon | 3,301,000 | (82,000) | -2.4% | (343,000) |
| Cox | 3,050,000 | (90,000) | -2.9% | (340,000) |
| Altice | 2,439,000 | (52,800) | -2.1% | (293,300) |
| Mediacom | 510,000 | (15,000) | -2.9% | (62,000) |
| Breezeline | 309,627 | (13,411) | -4.2% | (37,102) |
| Frontier | 306,000 | (16,000) | -5.0% | (74,000) |
| Cable ONE | 181,500 | (20,500) | -10.1% | (79,500) |
| Total | 61,902,127 | (1,464,711) | -2.3% | (6,253,902) |
| Hulu Live | 4,500,000 | 100,000 | 2.3% | 200,000 |
| Sling TV | 2,334,000 | (77,000) | -3.2% | (152,000) |
| FuboTV | 1,445,000 | 214,000 | 17.4% | 323,000 |
| Total Cable | 37,779,127 | (775,711) | -2.0% | (3,531,902) |
| Total Other | 24,123,000 | (689,000) | -2.8% | (2,722,000) |
| Total vMvPD | 8,279,000 | 237,000 | 2.9% | 371,000 |
The losses are fairly even across the industry, with most cable providers seeing around a 10% drop in cable customers during the year. The exceptions were Charter, which lost only 4.3%, Frontier that lost almost 20%, and Cable One (Sparklight) that lost over 30% of customers. If these trends continue for another year, Charter will pass Comcast and become the largest traditional cable provider.
The magnitude of the losses are staggering, with Comcast losing over 2 million cable customers during the year and DirecTV losing 1.5 million.
To put the loss of cable customers into context, these same large companies had over 85 million cable customers at the end of 2018 and are now down to under 62 million customers.
In the fourth quarter, the three online cable alternatives that LRG tracks gained 371,000 new customers for the year, A few major online alternatives, like YouTube TV aren’t on the list since they don’t announce customer counts.