A Repeat Performance for Cable TV 3Q22

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A Repeat Performance for Cable TV 3Q22

	By Doug Dawson President at CCG Consulting
	December 09, 2022 Views: 8,359 Add Comment

Traditional cable providers in the United States continue to lose cable TV customers at the same fast pace as the second quarter of the year. In the third quarter, the cable companies list 1.68 million customers after losing over 1.65 million customers in the second quarter.

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.

	2Q 2022	Change	Change
Comcast	16,582,000	(562,000)	-3.3%
Charter	15,291,000	(204,000)	-1.3%
DirecTV	13,500,000	(400,000)	-2.9%
Dish Network	7,607,000	(184,000)	-2.4%
Verizon	3,383,000	(96,000)	-2.8%
Cox	3,140,000	(90,000)	-2.8%
Altice	2,491,800	(82,400)	-3.2%
Mediacom	525,000	(15,000)	-2.8%
Frontier	322,000	(21,000)	-6.1%
Breezeline	323,038	(9,274)	-2.8%
Cable ONE	202,000	(19,000)	-8.6%

Total	63,366,838	(1,682,674)	-2.6%

Hulu Live	4,400,000	400,000	10.0%
Sling TV	2,211,000	214,000	9.7%
FuboTV	1,231,000	284,265	30.0%

Total Cable	39,536,512	(981,674)	-2.5%
Total Telco / Satellite	25,513,000	(701,000)	-2.7%
Total vMvPD	7,143,735	898,265	12.6%

The losses are fairly even across the industry, with every large provider except Charter losing more than 2% of total cable customers for the quarter. At the current pace, the industry might lose 10% of all cable customers this year. To put these numbers into perspective, these same companies had over 85 million cable customers at the end of 2018—the industry has lost over a quarter of its customers since then.

In the quarter, the three online cable alternatives that LRG tracks gained almost 900,000 new customers for the quarter, A few major online alternatives, like YouTube TV, aren’t on the list since they don’t announce customer counts.

The biggest percentage of losers continues to be Frontier and Cable ONE, with Comcast being the third largest.

By Doug Dawson, President at CCG Consulting

Dawson has worked in the telecom industry since 1978 and has both a consulting and operational background. He and CCG specialize in helping clients launch new broadband markets, develop new products, and finance new ventures.

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