Cable TV in free fall as industry loses another 1.62 million viewers

It seems like only yesterday that cable TV executives — and the analysts poised to prop up their narratives to boost stock valuations — were busy insisting that the “cord cutting” trend was a “fiction” that would abate any moment now. It was the kind of thinking that helped justify their inability to adapt to consumer frustration and a quickly-changed market.

A decade or so later and streaming and alternative free video services (YouTube, TikTok) have effectively crushed traditional cable underfoot. The cable industry has lost 4 million subscribers in just the first six months of 2024 alone, as users increasingly shift to streaming, over the air broadcasts, piracy, or free video services. Last quarter alone saw another 1.62 million U.S. consumers cut the cord:

“This marks the tenth consecutive quarter of double-digit declines,” wrote analysts Craig Moffett. “It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no longer any floor.”

Back between 2010 and 2015 or so you’d hear cable executives constantly insist that they didn’t need to adjust on pricing or improve customer service because cord cutting was a trend that would just magically stop when Millennials started procreating (it didn’t). It was pretty broadly normalized to pretend that this very obvious market shift wasn’t actually happening; they’ve mostly memory holed that entire era.

Most major cable TV giants aren’t suffering too badly, in large part because most of the biggest ones (Comcast, Charter) still enjoy a lucrative monopoly over broadband access across vast swaths of the U.S. Most of the losses they’re taking on video can be compensated by charging users more and more money for broadband, either via rate hikes or weird nickel-and-diming efforts (usage caps, hidden fees).

But a growing number of broadband and TV providers are increasingly ditching offering cable TV themselves, instead shoveling their users over to streaming alternatives.

For a while there, new streaming services were also seeing a dip in subscriptions, but that seems to have recovered, with vMVPDs (virtual Multichannel Video Programming Distributors like Dish’s SlingTV or Google’s YouTube TV) adding 490,000 subscribers during the second quarter.

That said, many of the same executives who drove cord cutting through relentless price hikes and incompetence have migrated over to streaming, where they appear poised to repeat all the same mistakes all over again, having learned absolutely nothing from experience. Techdirt