Leichtman Research Group recently released the cable customer counts for the largest providers of traditional cable service in the third quarter of 2023. LRG compiles most of these numbers from the statistics provided to stockholders, except for Cox and Mediacom – they now combine an estimate for both companies. 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 almost 1.8 million customers in the second quarter, even faster than the second quarter. Overall, the traditional cable providers lost over 19,700 customers every day during the quarter. The overall penetration of traditional cable TV is now around 43% of all households, down from 73% at the end of 2017.
| 3Q 2022 | Change | Change | |
| Comcast | 14,495,000 | (490,000) | -3.3% |
| Charter | 14,379,000 | (327,000) | -2.2% |
| DirecTV | 11,850,000 | (500,000) | -4.0% |
| Dish Network | 6,720,000 | (181,000) | -2.6% |
| Cox & Mediacom | 3,340,000 | (100,000) | -3.0% |
| Verizon | 3,076,000 | (79,000) | -2.5% |
| Altice | 2,326,500 | (79,400) | -3.3% |
| Breezeline | 288,881 | (8,071) | -2.7% |
| Frontier | 248,000 | (19,000) | -7.1% |
| Cable ONE | 148,900 | (9,200) | -5.8% |
| Total | 56,772,281 | (1,792,671) | -3.1% |
| YouTube | 6,500,000 | 600,000 | 10.2% |
| Hulu Live | 4,600,000 | 300,000 | 7.0% |
| Sling TV | 2,120,000 | 117,000 | 5.8% |
| FuboTV | 1,477,000 | 310,000 | 26.6% |
| Total Cable Company | 34,729,381 | (1,013,671) | -2.8% |
| Total Telco / Satellite | 21,894,000 | (799,000) | -3.4% |
| Total vMvPD | 13,370,000 | 1,327,000 | 9.9% |
Losses were big across the board for both cable companies, satellite companies, and telcos.
In the third quarter, the alternative programming options like YouTube and Hulu Live picked up a lot of the customers that were lost by traditional cable providers.
Cable is dead man walking. Millenials and Zoomers understand that all you need is whatever your favorite set of streaming services are and then you don’t have to pay for 500 channels of junk, plus subsidize fox news. Demographics has come a-calling.
‘cable’ as in TV service, almost certainly so.
‘cable’ as an internet service? I think that when the current infatuation over fiber fades a bit and cable companies re-evaluate their model for a competative landscape, ‘cable’ as in DOCSIS will make a resurgence. It’s a good tech, mostly marred by the companies that deploy it.
It’s also much simpler to make resilient than GPON networks. remote CMTS can natively support ring networks so single fiber cuts don’t necessarily take down hole cities. Obviously providers dont have to deploy this way, but it’s very simple to do so vs GPON which has longer ‘last mile’ runs over single points of failure that are very dificult ie expensive to build around.