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.