Last November, the headlines were that the top pay TV providers in this large market had fallen with losses of more than 1.7 million subscribers. Well, today, May 2020, there are almost 5 million disconnections.
Bruce Leichtman, President and Chief Analyst of Leichtman Research Group
The figures are alarming. US pay TV providers lost nearly 5 million subscribers in 2019 according to a new report by the Leichtman Research Group, this is significantly more than the 975,000 subscribers lost in the third quarter of 2018.
The largest pay TV providers in the United States, representing 95 percent of the market, lost more than 4.9 million net video subscribers in 2019, up from 1.6 million registered in 2018, according to a new study by Leichtman Research Group.
Hard numbers. Top pay TV providers in the country together have 86.2 million subscribers.
Including 45.8 million video subscribers at the top seven cable companies.
25.4 million in satellite television services, 8.3 million in major telephone companies and 6.7 million the three main pay TV services that distribute virtual multichannel video programming (vMVPD).
The report. Of these, DirecTV lost almost 3.2 million subscribers.
Direct broadcast satellite (DBS) services lost 12.7 percent, up from 7.5 percent in 2018.
For its part, Dish TV lost 511 thousand customers.
AT&T lost 4.1 million subscribers on its three pay TV services (DirecTV, AT&T U-verse and AT&T TV Now), compared to 750,000 lost in 2018.
The losses. 462,000 subscribers last year for Charter, 150,000 for Cox, 106,000 for Altice, 66,000 for Mediacom, 39,000 for Cable One and 4,061 for Atlantic Broadband.
Another big loser. Of the phone operators, Verizon Fios lost 222,000 customers, AT&T U-verse lost 264,000 and Frontier lost 178,000 subscribers.
You could see it coming. Changing consumer habits and discouraging numbers for some groups of executives who only went to “meetings and boards” but their work was inefficient.
Bruce Leichtman, President and Chief Analyst of Leichtman Research Group, said in November according to his figures to that date that “This marked the fifth consecutive quarter of record net losses in the pay TV industry. AT&T, the leading pay TV provider in the US, accounted for 79% of net losses in the quarter compared to 30% of net losses in the third quarter of 2018.”
“This change is largely the result of AT&T’s strategic decision to focus more and more on retaining and acquiring more profitable subscribers.” But where are those most profitable subscribers? Let’s see TVMAS readers answer the question.