Pay-TV Subscriber Losses Picking Up Speed, Says Pivotal Analyst
Pay-TV trends, including eight straight quarters of accelerating year-over-year subscriber losses, are getting nastier, with losses materially accelerating starting in Q4, likely worsening in the traditionally weak Q2, Pivotal Research's Jeff Wlodarczak wrote investors Friday. Losses are accelerating even when…
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vMVPD is included, he said. That acceleration is likely to grow with the emergence of cheap entertainment alternatives like the Disney Plus streaming service, the analyst said. Cable saw a 45 percent jump in subscriber losses in Q1, losing 560,000, he said, adding that direct broadcast satellite lost 640,000 -- a 70 percent year-over-year increase. Telco video losses were up 90 percent to 118,000. He said virtual MVPD subscriptions likely amounted to roughly 7.5 million. Q1 saw net new broadband subscriptions up 10 percent, household penetration hitting 83.5 percent. Cable had 99 percent of net new subs, and telco net new data subs were up for the first time in three years, he said. The 20-plus million DSL subscribers "are ripe for cable to steal" given increasing data usage trends that seem to eliminate the idea of wireless data substitution, he said. Netflix "has effectively already won" the global over-the-top race and Disney Plus could end up helping by accelerating pay-TV decline, he said.