Tag Archives: Leichtman Research Group

Cord Cutting Continues in 2023

Leichtman Research Group recently released the cable customer counts for the largest providers of traditional cable service at the end 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.

I suspect there are regular blog readers who wonder why I post these statistics every quarter. There are several reasons.

  • I find it fascinating to watch the slow train wreck of the implosion of the cable TV industry. Recall that the big cable companies like Comcast and Charter got so large through selling only cable TV and no other products. Technology let them compete and then beat telcos for broadband customers, but they already had a huge number of customers in 2000 when broadband competition kicked off in earnest.
  • I’m fascinated to see that there are still over 55 million household buying cable TV from the largest companies. A lot of folks have completely written off cable TV as irrelevant, and a thing of the past, but 42% of households are still buying a traditional cable TV package. Roughly 30 million homes have cut the cord since 2018, but there are still 55 million more homes that might someday migrate all of their video to broadband networks.

The traditional cable providers continue to lose customers at a torrid pace, losing 1.7 million customers in the third quarter. Overall, traditional cable providers lost over 18,700 customers every day during the quarter. The overall penetration of traditional cable TV is now down to 42% of all households, down from 73% at the end of 2017.In the fourth quarter, Comcast dropped from being the large cable provider and fell below Charter. Losses were big across the board, and only Charter, Verizon, and Breezeline lost less than 10% of the cable customer base for the year. The traditional cable providers lost over 6.9 million cable customers for the year – with only a fourth of those customers choosing an online cable substitute.

In the fourth quarter, online cable substitutes like YouTube and Hulu Live picked up 1,476,000 customers, almost all by YouTube. For the year, these providers added almost 1.9 million customers.

Broadband Subscribers 4Q 2023

Leichtman Research Group recently released broadband customer statistics for the end of 2023 for the largest cable and telephone companies. Leichtman compiles most of these numbers from the statistics provided to stockholders other than for Cox and Mediacom, which are estimated and now reported together. Leichtman says this group of companies represents 96% of all US landline broadband customers.

Broadband growth for the fourth quarter is still coming almost entirely from the growth of FWA cellular broadband provided by T-Mobile and Verizon. This is particularly true since AT&T’s smaller FWA growth is buried in its overall numbers. For the quarter, FWA fixed cellular customers grew by 929,000 thousand while telco grew by 28,000 subscribers, and cable companies collectively lost 144,000. The fourth quarter of 2023 might be remembered as the quarter when cable companies started to collectively lose customers while telcos collectively gained customers.

Annual
4Q 2023 4Q Change Change
Comcast 32,253,000 (34,000) (66,000)
Charter 30,588,000 (61,000) 155,000
AT&T 15,288,000 (8,000) (98,000)
Verizon 7,650,000 38,000 166,000
Cox & Mediacom 7,020,000 (15,000) (8,000)
T-Mobile FWA 4,776,000 541,000 2,130,000
Altice 4,517,900 (27,500) (114,100)
Verizon FWA 3,067,000 388,000 1,536,000
Frontier 2,943,000 62,000 75,000
Lumen 2,758,000 (78,000) (279,000)
Windstream 1,175,000 0 0
Cable ONE 1,059,300 1,900 (1,100)
Breezeline 663,286 (8,476) (29,184)
TDS 539,800 7,200 29,800
Consolidated 393,219 6,998 25,761
Total 114,691,505 813,122 3,522,177
Cable 76,101,486 (144,076) (63,384)
Telco 30,747,019 28,198 (80,439)
FWA 7,843,000 929,000 3,666,000

In the telco sector, Lumen continued to shrink and lost 2.8% of its broadband customers in the quarter. AT&T had a tiny loss, and all other telcos saw growth. Surprisingly, the biggest telco gainer in the fourth quarter was Frontier, which is finally seeing its fiber strategy working.

The only cable company with a tiny growth is Cable One, and every other large cable company lost broadband customers in the fourth quarter.

For the year, the big broadband companies grew by 3.5 million customers, and all of the annual growth came from FWA cellular. As expected, T-Mobile FWA passed Altice in size, and Verizon FWA surpassed Frontier in the fourth quarter. Lumen is the biggest loser, having lost 9.2% of its broadband customers in 2023.

LRG Annual Broadband Survey

Leichtman Research Group, Inc. (LRG) conducted its annual survey on household broadband usage and found that 90% of U.S. homes now have broadband. The survey was conducted in October and November 2023 and surveyed 1,767 adults across the country. LRG says broadband penetration is up from 81% in 2018 and 57% in 2008.

Here are some of the key findings from the survey:
·         The survey said that 92% of homes have some type of Internet connection, meaning that 2% of homes are using something that is not considered to be broadband. My guess is that these homes might perhaps be using only a cell phone for home broadband. LRG says this number is up from 83% in 2018 and 76% in 2008.
·         60% of homes are satisfied with their broadband service. This is the highest satisfaction ever found by LRG and compares to 53% in 2018 and 59% in 2013.
·         Only 5% said they were very dissatisfied with broadband (chose from 1 to 3 on a scale of 10)
·         70% of households say that their Internet connection meets the household needs (which means it doesn’t for 30% of homes).
·         42% of households don’t know the download speed they should be receiving, down from 59% in 2018.
·         22% said that their ISP is the only option available to them.
·         87% of households use a laptop or desktop computer.
·         64% of homes with no home broadband don’t own a computer or laptop.

Surveys like this are always of interest to me since my consulting company conducts a lot of surveys every year. The vast majority of the surveys we conduct are in communities where there is not great broadband. This might mean a rural county with a large number of homes with no fast broadband connection or cities where residents have expressed a lot of desire for a better broadband alternative.

In all of the surveys we’ve done, the percentage of folks who are not happy with broadband has been higher than shown by a nationwide survey – as might be expected.

For example, in the surveys we’ve done in the last year, anywhere from 30% to 50% of households with students at home say that their home broadband isn’t good enough to support homework.

The LRG survey shows that only 5% of homes are unhappy with broadband, but in the communities we’ve studied, it’s typically around 30% unhappiness, sometimes higher.

Our surveys also show a lot less competition. We recently did a business survey where 90% of the businesses in a county said they felt like they only had one realistic choice for an ISP.

Note that I’m not criticizing the LRG results, and the company results from these surveys track well from year to year. Instead, our surveys show that broadband is a lot worse in rural counties than in the big urban and suburban areas where most people live.

If anything, our surveys demonstrate that the urban/rural digital divide is real – and it doesn’t just mean rural homes with no broadband. In our surveys, there is generally a lot of dissatisfaction from customers in the County seat and not just in rural areas. Our surveys show that the big telcos and cable companies don’t perform as well in smaller markets and that customers are far less satisfied in every aspect of broadband compared to the nationwide numbers measured by LRG.

Traditional Cable Continues to Plummet

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.

Broadband Subscribers 3Q 2023

Leichtman Research Group recently released broadband customer statistics for the end of the third quarter of 2023 for the largest cable and telephone companies. Leichtman compiles most of these numbers from the statistics provided to stockholders other than for Cox and Mediacom, which are estimated and now reported together. Leichtman says this group of companies represents 96% of all US landline broadband customers.

The first quarter of the year shows a continuation of the trend where all of the growth in broadband is coming from T-Mobile and Verizon FWA fixed cellular wireless. Those two companies added 941,000 customers, while the rest of the ISPs collectively added only 8,000 customers.

3Q 2023

2Q 2023

Change

Change
Comcast

32,287,000

32,305,000

-18,000

-0.10%
Charter

30,649,000

30,586,000

63,000

0.20%
AT&T

15,296,000

15,304,000

-8,000

-0.10%
Verizon

7,612,000

7,562,000

50,000

0.70%
Cox & Mediacom

7,035,000

7,035,000

0

0.00%
Altice

4,545,400

4,576,100

-30,700

-0.70%
T-Mobile FWA

4,235,000

3,678,000

557,000

15.10%
Frontier

2,881,000

2,865,000

16,000

0.60%
Lumen

2,836,000

2,909,000

-73,000

-2.50%
Verizon FWA

2,679,000

2,295,000

384,000

16.70%
Windstream

1,175,000

1,175,000

0

0.00%
Cable ONE

1,057,400

1,057,900

-500

0.00%
Breezeline

671,762

680,785

-9,023

-1.30%
TDS

532,600

523,600

9,000

1.70%
Consolidated

386,221

376,829

9,392

2.50%
Total

113,878,383

112,929,214

949,169

0.80%
Cable

76,245,562

76,240,785

4,777

0.00%
Telco

30,718,821

30,715,429

3,392

0.00%
FWA

6,914,000

5,973,000

941,000

15.80%

In the telco sector, the big loser was Lumen, which lost 2.5% of its broadband customers in the quarter. AT&T had a tiny loss, and all other telcos saw growth. Leichtman is not yet separately tracking AT&T’s FWA customers, but AT&T reported recently that it is adding 2,000 FWA customers per week. I assume those are included in the AT&T totals. During this quarter, Frontier grew to have more broadband customers than Lumen – a big turnaround after Frontier lost customers for years.

For the second quarter in a row, the only cable company with positive growth was Charter – its strategy of expanding its footprint into rural areas is clearly covering for losses elsewhere.

FWA cellular companies added more customers than the previous quarter and experienced an enormous 15.8% growth for the quarter. If similar growth happens in the fourth quarter, T-Mobile will pass Altice in size, and Verizon will pass both Frontier and Lumen.

Cable Customer Losses in 2Q 2023

Leichtman Research Group recently released the cable customer counts for the largest providers of traditional cable service in the second 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 over 1.6 million customers in the second quarter, slightly fewer losses than the second quarter of 2022. Overall, the traditional cable providers lost over 17,700 customers every day during the quarter. The overall penetration of traditional cable TV is now around 46% of all households, down from 73% at the end of 2017.

2Q 2022 Change Change
Comcast 14,985,000 (543,000) -3.5%
Charter 14,706,000 (200,000) -1.3%
DirecTV 12,350,000 (400,000) -3.1%
Dish Network 6,901,000 (197,000) -2.8%
Cox & Mediacom 3,340,000 (100,000) -2.9%
Verizon 3,155,000 (70,000) -2.2%
Altice 2,405,900 (69,900) -2.8%
Breezeline 296,952 (3,732) -1.2%
Frontier 267,000 (21,000) -7.3%
Cable ONE 158,100 (8,900) -5.3%
   Total 58,564,952 (1,613,532) -2.7%
YouTube 5,900,000 200,000 3.5%
Hulu Live 4,300,000 (100,000) -2.3%
Sling TV 2,003,000 (97,000) -4.6%
FuboTV 1,167,000 (118,000) -9.2%
Total Cable Company 35,733,852 (916,632) -2.5%
Total Telco / Satellite 22,673,000 (688,000) -2.9%
Total vMvPD 13,370,000 (115,000) -0.9%

It doesn’t look like people are replacing traditional cable with an online alternative like YouTube and Hulu Live – which collectively lost 115,000 customers in the quarter.

Charter is still losing customers at a slower rate than other traditional cable companies. At current trends, Charter ought to have the most cable customers soon – something that could not have been imagined only three or four years ago.

The biggest news is that Comcast is one of the biggest percentage losers, and the biggest overall loser, down 543,000 cable customers in the quarter. The biggest percentage losers continue to be Frontier and Cable ONE.

Broadband Customers 2Q 2023

Leichtman Research Group recently released broadband customer statistics for the end of the second quarter of 2023 for the largest cable and telephone companies. Leichtman compiles most of these numbers from the statistics provided to stockholders other than for Cox and Mediacom, which are estimated, and now reported together. Leichtman says this group of companies represents 96% of all US landline broadband customers.

The first quarter of the year shows a continuation of the trend where all of the growth in broadband is coming from T-Mobile and Verizon FWA fixed cellular wireless. Those two companies added 903,000 customers, while the rest of the ISPs collectively lost over 52,000 customers.

2Q 2023 1Q 2023 1Q Change % Change
Comcast 32,305,000 32,324,000 (19,000) -0.1%
Charter 30,586,000 30,509,000 77,000 0.3%
AT&T 15,304,000 15,345,000 (41,000) -0.3%
Verizon 7,562,000 7,528,000 34,000 0.5%
Cox & Mediacom 7,035,000 7,035,000 0 0.0%
Altice 4,576,100 4,612,700 (36,600) -0.8%
T-Mobile FWA 3,678,000 3,169,000 509,000 16.1%
Lumen 2,909,000 2,981,000 (72,000) -2.4%
Frontier 2,865,000 2,863,000 2,000 0.1%
Verizon FWA 2,260,000 1,866,000 394,000 21.1%
Windstream 1,175,000 1,175,000 0 0.0%
Cable ONE 1,057,900 1,063,000 (5,100) -0.5%
Breezeline 680,785 687,519 (6,734) -1.0%
TDS 523,600 515,400 8,200 1.6%
Consolidated 376,829 369,862 6,967 1.9%
Total 112,894,214 112,043,481 850,733 0.8%
Cable 76,240,785 76,231,219 9,566 0.0%
Telco 30,715,429 30,777,262 (61,833) -0.2%
FWA 5,938,000 5,035,000 903,000 17.9%

The telcos collectively lost almost 62,000 customers in the quarter despite gains from Verizon FiOS, TDS, and Consolidated of 49,000 customers for the quarter. The biggest loser was Lumen, losing 72,000 broadband customers.

The only cable company with positive growth was Charter – its strategy of expanding its footprint into rural areas is clearly paying off.

It’s hard to see from these numbers where the huge growth of FWA wireless broadband is coming from. Much of the FWA growth is coming in rural markets where the competition is fixed wireless and satellite service. But FWA pricing seems to be aimed squarely at competing with DSL and probably counts for the overall losses for AT&T and Lumen. Both companies are adding fiber customers and are losing DSL customers more quickly than indicated by the overall numbers. I’m sure AT&T hates the loss of DSL revenue, but competition from FWA makes it that much easier for the company to eventually walk away from rural copper.

 

Traditional Cable Continues to Dive

The largest traditional cable providers collectively lost over 1.8 million customers in the first quarter of 2023 – an overall loss of 2.9% of customers. To put the quarter’s loss into perspective, the big cable providers lost almost 20,000 cable customers per day throughout the quarter.

The numbers below come from Leichtman Research Group which compiles these numbers from reports made to investors, except for Cox and Mediacom, which is estimated. The numbers reported are for the largest cable providers, and LRG estimates that these companies represent 95% of all cable customers in the country.

Following is a comparison of the first quarter subscriber numbers compared to the end of the 2022:

1Q 2023 4Q 2022 1Q Change % Change
Comcast 15,528,000 16,142,000 (614,000) -3.8%
Charter 14,906,000 15,147,000 (241,000) -1.6%
DirecTV 12,750,000 13,100,000 (350,000) -2.7%
Dish TV 7,098,000 7,416,000 (318,000) -4.3%
Verizon 3,225,000 3,301,000 (76,000) -2.3%
Cox 2,950,000 3,050,000 (100,000) -3.3%
Altice 2,475,800 2,536,300 (60,500) -2.4%
Mediacom 490,000 510,000 (20,000) -3.9%
Breezeline 300,684 309,627 (8,943) -2.9%
Frontier 288,000 306,000 (18,000) -5.9%
Cable ONE 167,000 181,500 (14,500) -8.0%
Total 60,178,484 61,999,427 (1,820,943) -2.9%
YouTube 5,700,000 5,600,000 100,000 1.8%
Hulu Live 4,400,000 4,500,000 (100,000) -2.2%
Sling TV 2,100,000 2,334,000 (234,000) -10.0%
FuboTV 1,285,000 1,445,000 (160,000) -11.1%
Total Cable 36,817,484 37,876,427 (1,058,943) -2.8%
Total Other 23,361,000 24,123,000 (762,000) -3.2%
Total vMvPD 13,485,000 13,879,000 (394,000) -2.8%

Some observations about the numbers:

  • The big overall loser is now Comcast, which lost a net of 614,000 traditional video customers in the quarter.
  • The big percentage losers continued to be Frontier which lost 5.9% of its cable customers, and cable ONE that lost 8% of customers.
  • Charter lost the lowest percentage of customers at 1.6% of its customer base, but that still totaled to be 241,000 customers.

To put these losses into perspective, these same companies had over 85 million cable customers at the end of 2018 – a loss since then of 25 million customers (29%).

The biggest online programming providers are also losing customers, and collectively lost 2.8% of customers for the quarter, the same as the cable companies. It’s clear that a lot of homes are cleanly cutting the cord and replacing traditional channel lineups with something else.

A few folks have asked me why I continue to track cable subscriptions. First, while cable is getting slaughtered in the market, half of all U.S. homes continue to use some form of traditional cable. Second, these big losses for the big cable companies are part of what is driving them to continue to raise broadband rates, even as they’ve stopped adding broadband customers. I think this is still relevant as long as the majority of cable customers are served by the largest ISPs. But ultimately, it’s hard to stop watching a slow motion train wreck while it’s happening.

A Repeat Performance for Cable 4Q 2022

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.

2022 Was a Year of Change for the Big ISPs

There was a sea change among the big ISPs in 2022. The big news is that most of the growth in the industry came from the T-Mobile and Verizon cellular FWA broadband product. Cable company growth crawled to a halt after a robust 2021, and the sector only grew by 55,000 net broadband customers in the fourth quarter. The big telcos still had small losses for the year, but the big news is that they added 2.4 million customers to fiber during the year.

The following list of ISPs represents about 95% of the U.S. broadband market. The large ISPs, in aggregate, added just over 3.5 million net customers in 2022. The two cellular FWA companies added 3,171,000 of those additions. Cable companies added 517,103 customers for the year, with most of the growth coming at the beginning of the year. The big telcos had a net loss of 181,276 customers but continued to furiously replace DSL with fiber.

The following statistics were compiled by the Leichtman Research Group, which tracks the broadband performance of the largest ISPs in the country. Following are the customers counts for the fourth quarter and the end of year 2022:

% 4Q Annual
4Q 2022 4Q Change Change Change
Comcast 32,151,000 (26,000) -0.1% 250,000
Charter 30,433,000 105,000 0.3% 344,000
AT&T 15,386,000 (66,000) -0.4% (118,000)
Verizon 7,484,000 37,000 0.5% 119,000
Cox 5,560,000 0 0.0% 30,000
Altice 4,282,900 (7,700) -0.2% (103,300)
Lumen 3,037,000 (63,250) -2.0% (253,000)
Frontier 2,839,000 8,000 0.3% 40,000
T-Mobile FWA 2,646,000 524,000 24.7% 2,000,000
Mediacom 1,468,000 0 0.0% 5,000
Verizon FWA 1,452,000 389,000 36.6% 1,171,000
Windstream 1,175,000 0 0.0% 10,300
Cable ONE 1,060,400 (1,600) -0.2% 14,400
Breezeline 693,781 (14,173) -2.0% (22,997)
TDS 510,000 3,500 0.7% 19,700
Consolidated 367,458 (14,454) -3.8% 724
Total 110,545,539 873,323 0.8% 3,506,827
Cable 75,649,081 55,527 0.1% 517,103
Telco 30,798,458 (95,204) -0.3% (181,276)
FWA 4,098,000 913,000 28.7% 3,171,000

There are a lot of interesting trends withing these numbers:

  • T-Mobile is now the 9th largest ISP, and the Verizon FWA product comes in at eleventh. T-Mobile is poised to pass Frontier and Lumen soon at the current growth rate.
  • While all of the landline ISPs on the list are feeling pressure from the cellular FWA product, the bigger and more permanent challenge for the cable companies is the 2.4 million telco customers added to fiber to the year. That statistic shows why cable companies are scrambling to improve upload speeds.
  • The biggest loser on the list continues to be Lumen, which lost 7.7% of its broadband customers for the year. It’s worth noting that the above numbers represent the smaller Lumen after the spinoff of Brightspeed in 2022. Breezeline (Formerly Atlantic Broadband) was the biggest percentage loser among cable companies, having lost 3.3% of broadband customers during the year.
  • TDS continues to be the fastest-growing landline ISP at 4.0% growth for the year. Next is Verizon FiOS, having grown by 1.6% for the year.