Leichtman Research Group, which has published well-regarded quarterly tallies of U.S. pay TV and broadband subscriber counts going back to the halcyon days of DSL in the early 2000s, is no longer offering its data to the public. 

The company’s First Quarter Research Notes, published back on March 26, will mark its last publicly distributed report.

“While LRG continues to track the industry and provide quarterly updates for our clients, I’ve decided to no longer publicly release the topline findings — I thought the year-end results were a good time to make the pivot,” company founder and principal analyst Bruce Leichtman told Next TV Thursday morning. 

We regularly abstracted LRG’s pay TV and broadband reports, sometimes getting too creative and driving past pro forma guardrails (apologies, Bruce).

We'll certainly miss LRG's quarterly data. 

And we missed the March 26 Research Notes report in which Leichtman — a New Englander, former distance runner and Kenny Loggins fan — discussed his company's pivot at length:

This is it 

In the early 2000s I discovered that running could actually be fun. While I was never gifted with speed, I enjoyed the motivation to improve, along with the feeling of being outside even on a cold New England day. As my distances expanded, I found my go-to song for the longer runs and races: This Is It by Kenny Loggins. 

A person’s pump-up song can tell you a lot about them, and even if we’ve never met, I’ve just thrown my cards on the table. This song falls in the genre that I frequently listened to when I was younger, unfortunately now known as Yacht Rock. Somehow, this nomenclature doesn’t make it seem as hip as it did back in the day, when This Is It made it into the top 20 on both the Adult Contemporary and R&B charts. 

Not wholly coincidentally, my running hobby began around the same time I started Leichtman Research Group (LRG), a name that unsurprisingly was not already taken. My goal with LRG was to build on my communications industry experience and knowledge by conducting related consumer research with more frequency than the annual studies that some larger firms were doing. 

In addition, a discussion/bar bet with an industry colleague (about whether there were more broadband subscribers via cable or DSL) helped lead me to a complementary research model. Over the past two decades, LRG has tracked the number of subscribers reported by the major broadband and pay TV providers, and publicly released the cumulative quarterly topline findings to help provide an ongoing industry scoreboard (and possibly resolve any bets). 

But the industry tracking has also helped to guide the consumer research. While surveys can provide a wealth of information on what consumers have, want and think about various products and services, reporting from providers offers data that can tell us where the market actually stands. Observing the alignment between these two sources of data offers an advantageous view of industry dynamics. 

It is this combination of consumer research and provider tracking that have been at the core of my business, and have been the basis of these Research Notes. The Notes are a compilation of the press releases from the latest consumer research studies and the provider tracking results for the quarter, along with a dedicated column with some additional observations (often including the copious use of numbers to help illustrate my points). 

About a decade ago, my knees told me that road running was no longer in the cards, but as a business evolves there’s no torn meniscus to tell you that it’s time to stop putting out press releases and newsletters. While LRG will continue to research and track the industry, which is as fascinating as it has ever been, this is the final version of the Research Notes.

As usual, below you will find highlights from a recent LRG consumer study, along the latest provider subscriber figures for year-end 2023. 

Thanks very much to all who have received and read these Notes, and those who have provided valuable feedback and assistance through the years.

Netflix's global crackdown on account sharing, which hit U.S. shores around 10 months ago, appears to be bearing fruit.

According to Leichtman Research Group's Internet-Delivered TV Services 2024 report, which is based on a survey of 2,546 U.S. households, just 10% of domestic Netflix accounts are borrowed by someone living outside the account owner's household. 

That number has been dropping steadily -- compared to 15% in 2022, 14% in 2020, and 16% in 2018 -- since the streaming company refocused its efforts on eliminating the ability for multiple households to freely share one Netflix account.

With Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery also confirming plans to limit account sharing, the improvement is broad-based, LRG found. 

Overall, 10% of all DTC services are now borrowed from someone else, down from 12% in 2022. And 73% of all DTC services are fully paid for and are not shared with others outside the household. In LRG's comparable survey released in March of 2023, the firm pegged that metric at only 68%. 

LRG's new study found that of the 23% of DTC services used in more than one household, 11% of them are paid for by someone who shared them with another household, and 10% are borrowed from another household.

However, the likelihood that an individual shares the service increases among younger consumers, with 17% of all DTC services for the 18-35 age group fully paid for by somebody else, compared to just 7% for those in the 35+ demographic.

“Password sharing continues to be prevalent throughout the streaming video industry, despite recent efforts to limit it," said Bruce Leichtman, LRG president and principal analyst. “Overall, 20% of households have at least one DTC service that is paid for by another household.”

DirecTV is generally assumed to be America's third largest pay TV operator, but insight into its subscriber churn has been almost completely obscured since 2021, when the company was spun off from publicly traded AT&T and placed in control of private equity firm TPG Capital. 

Using proprietary methods, Leichtman Research Group provides a quarterly estimate of DirecTV's customer comings and goings (OK, they're all "goings" at this point). And according to the research company, the operator lost 1.8 million customers last year across DirecTV satellite TV, DirecTV Stream and AT&T U-verse.

In its latest U.S. pay TV customer tally for the largest operators, LRG also makes an informed estimate for YouTube TV, following Google's disclosure in early February that the virtual MVPD has surpassed 8 million users. The research company estimates that the platform added 1.9 million users last year -- entirely plausible, given that Google declared a count of around 5 million users in July 2022. 

Beyond that, LRG's tally of pay TV subscriber counts is fairly straight-forward, including numbers included in the most recent quarterly earnings reports. Here's a snapshot of where the top pay TV operators stood at the end of last year:

The top cable operators lost more high-speed internet users than they gained in 2023, the first time that's ever happened, Leichtman Research Group confirmed to Next TV. 

The top cable operators collectively lost more than 63,000 wireline broadband users last year (vs. a collective addition of 530,000 customers in 2022), LRG said, while fast-emerging fixed wireless access operators T-Mobile and Verizon jointly added 3.666 million FWA customers (vs. 3.185 million in 2022). 

FWA accounted for all the growth in the home broadband business in 2023, with total customer ranks expanding by more than 3.522 million users (vs. 3.506 million in 2022). 

“Top broadband providers added about 3.5 million subscribers in 2023, similar to the number of broadband adds in 2022,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc., in a statement.  “Over the past four years, top providers added about 15.9 million broadband subscribers, compared to about 10.2 million net broadband adds in the prior four (pre-pandemic) years.”

At the end of September 2021, Leichtman Research Group estimated that among the cable operators and wireless companies controlling 96% of the U.S. home broadband market, MSOs accounted for a nearly 70% market share. 

Then nascent 5G fixed wireless access services, recently launched by T-Mobile and Verizon at the time, didn't even factor in LRG's third-quarter tally that year, which saw accounted for U.S. cable companies add nearly 600,000 high-speed internet customers. 

Jump forward to LRG's Q3 2023 tally of the top ISPs serving 96% of the U.S. market, and T-Mobile and Verizon added another 941,000 FWA users. The two companies now collectively reach a base of over 6.9 million home internet customers, mostly at 5G speeds. And that's not accounting for AT&T's recent entry into the fixed-wireless market and the 25,000 subscribers it added inQ3. 

Very quickly, FWA has grown to control around 6% of the U.S. home internet market.

Cable operators, meanwhile, added fewer than 5,000 new wireline broadband customers between them in Q3. Their share of the market has dipped to about 66%.

Of course, a converse narrative is emerging in the U.S. consumer mobile market, where cable company MVNO-based services now control the bulk of new customer additions every quarter. 

The percentage of U.S. homes subscribing to "traditional" pay TV services (i.e. not streaming virtual MVPDs) has dipped below a critical threshold

Leichtman Research Group says that only 49% of U.S. households currently take linear cable, satellite or telco TV, down from 57% in 2021 and 74% in 2018. 

Yes, that's an 8% decline in 24 months. 

LRG said 15% of homes subscribe to vMVPDs, up from 14% in 2021 and just 4% in 2018. 

The overall 64% of homes that take a pay TV service in 2023 compares to 78% in 2018 and 86% in 2013. 

The findings for the research company's Pay-TV in the U.S. 2023 report were based on surveys of 1,769 U.S. households. 

Among all pay-TV subscribers, the mean reported spending per month is $112.70, which is 5% higher than the mean monthly spending in 2018. 

Pay TV isn't just getting more expensive, it's skewing older. 

The mean age of traditional pay-TV subscribers is 49.3 vs. 42.5 among non-subscribers, and 40.8 with vMVPD-only.

Also notable: Among those that never had a pay-TV service, 63% are ages 18-34.

On Thursday, September 7, the up-and-coming Detroit Lions will visit the defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, kicking off the 2023 NFL season. 

If what is currently the largest station blackout in America isn't resolved by that time, customers for the third biggest pay TV platform provider in the country, DirecTV, won't be able to watch the game in interested local Chiefs markets like Joplin, Missouri, as well as Wichita and Topeka, Kansas, where three of Nexstar's NBC affiliate stations are located. 

Meanwhile, up in Michigan, DirecTV-subscribing Lions fans in Grand Rapids won't be able to watch the game on Nexstar's WOOD-TV, at least not without an over-the-air antenna.  

All those crabby snacks and homemades ... for nothin'.

Juxtaposing Nexstar's map of its network affiliates against the earlier NFL regular season schedule, it's obvious that this retrans kerfuffle, which actually started as a sleepy affair back in early July, when little programming of consequence was on the Big Four broadcast networks, is about to get real. 

Actually, consider Saturday, August 26, the official start of "gets real," with NBC's presentation of Navy visiting Notre Dame kicking off the 2023 college football season. 

Currently, 169 Nexstar Media Group stations are blacked out on DirecTV satellite TV, DirecTV Stream and U-verse TV.  

The blackout count of affiliates rises to well over 200 when you factor in long-running disputes between DirecTV and Mission Broadcasting and White Knight Broadcasting, which both contract Nexstar to operate their stations. (DirecTV has taken its beef about that to the FCC.)

Nexstar said DirecTV rejected an earlier offer to keep Nexstar affiliates on its platforms through October while a renewal is hashed out.

DirecTV said that Nexstar's current demands would double the fees the operator previously paid for broadcast retransmission. 

In any event, it seems likely -- very probable, in fact -- that the wartime rhetoric between the two companies will ramp up significantly in the coming days. 

So how many DirecTV customers will be impacted? Real hard to say. 

DirecTV was spun off from AT&T two years ago in a deal with private equity. The last time DirecTV publicly reported subscriber numbers was for the second quarter of 2021, when it disclosed a loss of 473,000 pay TV souls. That was actually a significant deceleration of loss, given that the operator's bleed rate had reached around 13% the year prior. 

So after battling the far right over carriage of OAN and Newsmax, losing NFL Sunday Ticket to Google, then embarking on a huge broadcast affiliate blackout with the top station group in the U.S., what does DirecTV's subscriber picture look like now?

According to Leichtman Research Group estimates released Tuesday, DirecTV is still the No. 3 U.S. pay TV operator, with 12.35 million subscribers across its three platforms. It lost around 400,000 subscribers in the second quarter, LRG said. 

"I base the estimate on the performance of others in the industry in the quarter, and where DirecTV would likely fit. I relate it to last year’s estimate, and I use consumer research to help ballpark it," principal analyst Bruce Leichtman said to Next TV, in an email explaining his methodology. 

T-Mobile and Verizon collectively added 893,000 fixed wireless access users in the second quarter, culminating in an installed base of 5.938 million subscribers, nearly double the FWA base of 2.244 million customers from a year prior.

According to the quarterly tally conducted by Leichtman Research Group, which accounts for the largest ISPs serving 96% of the U.S. residential broadband market, Verizon and T-Mobile FWA now control 5.2% of the country's home internet market. 

Also read: T-Mobile Adds 509K FWA Customers in Q2, Closes in on 4 Million

That's a nifty trick, considering that both wireless companies launched their FWA services just in 2021. 

FWA's fast emergence has come as cable ISPs have seen growth grind to a halt. 

Also read: Verizon Adds Another 384K FWA Subscribers in Q2

Market leader Comcast lost 19,000 residential broadband subs in Q2 and has only added around 142,000 customers over the last 12 months. During the pandemic, Comcast sometimes added that many high-speed users in a good week.

In all, the U.S. home broadband market grew by 840,000 customers in Q2, and FWA accounted for all of that expansion. 

As more consumers adopt these lower-priced 5G FWA services, the technology's well-documented capacity issues will certainly come into play. But these limitations haven't seemed to limit growth yet. 

The dominance of the “big three” U.S. subscription streaming services, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu, seems to have peaked. 

According to Leichtman Research Group, 83% of 2,101 U.S. households surveyed for the company's Emerging Video Services 2023 report (the 17th iteration in an annual series) said they subscribe to at least one of the big three services — which is flat with the 83% also reported in 2022, but up from 78% in 2020, 69% in 2018 and 52% in 2015. 

Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu now account for 43% of all streaming services in consumers’ homes, compared to 56% in 2020.

Factoring in a broader base of 15 streaming services available in the U.S. (Leichtman didn't name them beyond Netflix, Prime Video and Hulu), 88% of homes surveyed said they had at least one, up from 82% in 2020.

Consumers are stacking more platforms. 

Fifty-three percent of households said they pay for four or more SVOD/direct-to-consumer services vs. just 33% in 2020. The mean number of these services is now 4.1 per household vs. 2.9 in 2020. 

Meanwhile, 57% of U.S. adults now watch video on a “non-TV” device like a smartphone, computer or tablet, vs. 54% in 2021, 46% in 2018 and 33% in 2015.

Connected TV hasn't reached saturation in the U.S. yet, but it's getting close. 

According to Leichtman Research Group's latest survey of 1,770 U.S. adult consumers for its Connected TVs 2023 report, 88% of U.S. households have at least one TV connected to the internet, via embedded smart TV circuitry, through a gaming console, or an external HDMI stick, dongle or puck. 

That figure stood at 82% as recently as 2021, 74% in 2018 and 44% in 2013. 

Meanwhile, 67% of U.S. homes have multiple TV's hooked up to the internet vs. 62% in 2021. 

LRG also found that smart TV penetration has reached 74% of U.S. households, up from 64% in 2021. And 55% of all TV sets in the U.S. are connected smart TVs, up from 43% two years ago. 

Overall, the research company added, 49% of U.S. homes watch CTV every day -- up from 39% two years ago, with younger demos including those 18-34 over-indexing (63%) and older watchers not so much over-indexing  (only 27% of folks 55 and older stream daily). 

By the time Leichtman Research Group published its Q1 pay TV report Tuesday, the drama had already leaked out in numerous previous reports about record cord cutting during the January-March period. 

But we did notice a few interesting tidbits from today's LRG report.

One is LRG's estimate for DirecTV, which the research company believes lost around 350,000 customers in the first quarter. LRG also projects that DirecTV has about 12.75 million remaining customers across DirecTV satellite TV, DirecTV Stream and U-verse. 

This estimate might actually be on the low side -- an earlier guestimate from equity research firm MoffettNathanson suggests DirecTV is losing customers at a clip of nearly 17% a year. Doing the math on that reveals losses of over half a million customers each quarter. 

DirecTV was spun off by private equity in 2021 and no longer publicly discloses data for what is, collectively, the third largest pay TV platform.

Meanwhile, publicly traded Alphabet doesn't drill down on subscriber numbers for the top virtual MVPD, YouTube TV, either. 

LRG estimates that YouTube TV was the only major pay TV platform that grew in Q1 adding a projected 100,000 customers to reach 5.7 million. That would rank the Google live streaming platform No. 5 among all U.S. pay TV operators ... and climbing, as traditional incumbents bleed out subscribers at an accelerating rate. 

Their network capacity limitations might very will cap their explosive growth to the here and now, but make no mistake, recently launched fixed wireless access (FWA) platforms from T-Mobile and Verizon are the only things growing in residential broadband these days. 

As the latest quarterly assessment of the U.S. home broadband market from Leichtman Research Group shows, the two wireless companies combined to add 916,000 FWA customers in Q1.

The leading cable operators, which combined to add 1.23 million new customers in the first quarter of 2020, tacked on just 67,422 combined from January through March this year. 

T-Mobile and Verizon collectively added nearly 3.2 million fixed wireless access customers in 2022, accounting for more than 90% of the customer expansion for the entire U.S. home broadband industry, according to Leichtman Research Group's latest quarterly study of the top 15 U.S. ISPs covering 95% of the market. 

The top cable operators, which added around 2.8 million high-speed internet users in 2021, only tacked on just over half a million customers last year. That's a significant slowdown, especially when you consider that they added more than 4.8 million home internet customers in the pandemic year of 2020. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, as the U.S. broadband market approaches saturation, and cable operators increasingly plunge into wireless tech, MSOs are kicking the tires on FWA themselves to see if it could work with rural greenfield expansion. 

For example, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this week, Cox Communications revealed that it's conducting proof-of-concept trials for 5G FWA in Macon, Georgia; Tucson, Arizona; and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

“We're committed to creating digital equity in the communities we serve. We're hopeful this is another tool we can provide to help connect people to what matters most,” Cox said in a statement provided to FierceTelecom. 

Cox, which has long dabbled in the U.S. wireless business and just took another stab at launching a consumer mobile division, paid $212 million in 2020 to acquire frequency in the Citizens Broadband Radio Service spectrum. Cox, however, didn't specify that it's using CBRS frequency in its trials. 

The fact that the U.S. pay TV business is shrinking fast is hardly news anymore, but the rate at which it is eroding is certainly worth keeping up with. 

Leichtman Research Group (LRG) reported Friday that the top 14 pay TV operators in the U.S., minus Google, collectively lost nearly 5.9 million customers in 2022, finishing the year with just 70.2 million subscribers. 

That's a year-over-year attrition rate of nearly 8%. In 2021, LRG pegged overall shrinkage at just over 5% for the same companies. 

The loss leader was once again Comcast, which lost 11.2% of its linear video subscribers in 2022 to finish the year with just over 16.1 million.

 If the current rate of loss holds or accelerates, Comcast will fall behind Charter Communications and become the No. 2 U.S. pay TV operator by the end of 2023. Seriously -- Comcast shed over 2 million TV customers last year. Consider that Comcast's home city of Philadelphia only has a population of around 1.6 million citizens. 

Meanwhile, the fastest growing pay TV operator in LRG's chart Friday is FuboTV, which added 323,000 customers last year. As Next TV wrote earlier this week, FuboTV believes it will be cash-flow positive by 2025, but it keeps having to sell its own increasingly devalued stock to keep the lights on. It just raised another $68.1 million doing this in Q4. 

Notable: LRG includes estimates for DirecTV platforms, since AT&T spun them off to private equity and they no longer disclose subscriber counts in quarterly earnings reports. 

Also, Google/Alphabet rarely break out data for the top virtual MVPD, YouTubeTV, and LRG doesn't hazard an estimate for that platform. 

Nielsen's latest market share snapshot of overall U.S. TV viewing for January reveals that YouTube consumption grew by nearly 3 points in one year. Since Nielsen is measuring "glass" consumption and not mobile devices, the streaming portion of the pie is connected TV viewing. This makes us wonder if that spike is being caused by a significant uptick in specifically YouTube TV engagement and customers. 

Then again, if numbers were way, way up, Alphabet would probably break them out. 

Fixed Wireless Access services from T-Mobile and Verizon added a combined 920,000 home internet customers in the third quarter, driving a rather sudden and dramatic sea change in the U.S. broadband industry, according to new quarterly data published this week by Leichtman Research Group.

In fact, these economy-priced, 5G-powered FWA services led the broader U.S. high-speed internet (HSI) industry to growth at a time when the cable industry has virtually stopped adding high-speed internet subscribers, and losses of DSL and other legacy-tech-based services aren't being offset by additions of new fiber-to-the-home customers for telco wireline operators. 

Also read: Fixed Wireless Access Gets Put to the Test in Major Markets - Why 'Middle of the Pack' Looks Good Enough to Us

Year over year, T-Mobile have added nearly 2.6 million FWA customers. Since the end of the third quarter of 2021, the top seven U.S. cable operators have lost around 400,000  HSI customers, while the top seven telco companies have bled around 700,000 customers from their home internet ranks. 

“Over the past year, fixed wireless services have accounted for nearly 80% of the approximately 3,260,000 net broadband additions," said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc. 

What's perhaps so surprising is how fast the shift has come. The top MSOs added only around 39,000 HSI customers in the third quarter, with narrow gains by Comcast and Charter offset by losses at Altice USA. In the third quarter of 2021, these same cable operators added a combined 592,400 broadband customers. In the pandemic-influenced Q3 of 2020, they tacked on over 1.3 million customers in just three months. 

Wireline telcos, meanwhile, added 550,000 customers to newer fiber-to-the-home services in Q3, but these losses were offset by attrition of 685,000 subscribers to non-fiber HSI services. 

In total, non-FWA services lost nearly 100,000 customers from July - September. ■

Yes, the latest report from Leichtman Research Group, "Pay-TV in the U.S. 2022," suggests fewer consumers are using linear pay TV services. 

The U.S. base is down to 66% of TV households, LRG said, vs. 79% five years ago … and 88% a decade ago.

What we find interesting is the number of consumers, mostly younger adult ones, who have never had pay TV service ... and who likely never will. That's 34% of non-subscribers. Among that group who've never subscribed, 52% are between the ages of 18-34. 

Further, while 73% of adults 45 and older have pay TV, only 57% of folks between the ages of 18-44 do. 

Among the total base of U.S. TV households, 11.5% of homes have never had pay TV service.

So as U.S. society ages, folks aren't so much cutting the cord anymore en masse as they are losing consciousness of its very existence. That is how consumer habits die. 

“The decline in pay-TV subscribers is not solely a function of those disconnecting services, but is also related to a slowdown in those entering or reentering the category,” Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, said. “Overall, about 10.5% of TV households last subscribed to a pay-TV service in the past three years, 12% last subscribed over three years ago, and 11.5% never subscribed.” ▪️

Last week, the video business marveled over an infographic released by Nielsen, which samples living room TV consumption, showing that in July, U.S. viewing of streaming services outpaced watching of cable channels for the first time. 

Our reaction was a little skeptical — did this benchmark really just happen now?

The latest data from Leichtman Research Group supports our tire-kicking. In its newest annual “Emerging Video Services” report, LRG said that 59% of the 1,900 adult U.S. consumers it surveyed in June and July report daily video usage on "non-TV  devices" — mainly smartphones, tablets and computers. 

This audience share has risen steadily over the last decade — the response rate was 55% in 2020, 43% in 2017 and 18% in 2012.

Half of adults (50%) watch video on a mobile phone daily on smartphones — up from 44% in 2020, and 33% in 2017.

Fifty-one percent of adults watch YouTube on a non-TV device daily, followed by news clips at 35%

Our point: With so much “TV” watching occurring on mobile devices, streaming probably left linear broadcast and “cable” in the dust several years ago. 

Not surprisingly, younger individuals are most comfortable with mobile video usage. Among those 18-34, 83% said they watch video daily on a non-TV device. The response rate was 64% for ages 35-54 and 35% for ages 55 and above. 

“While non-TV devices provide the ability to watch video anywhere, the most common location for watching video on non-TV devices continues to be in the home,“ LRG principal Bruce Leichtman said. “Eighty-two percent of those who watch video on a mobile phone, and 85% of those who watch video on a tablet or eReader, do so at home.”

LRG also found that 83% of households now have a subscription video on-demand (SVOD) service from Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and/or Hulu,  compared to 78% in 2020, and 64% in 2017.

Overall, 64% of U.S. households now have more than one SVOD service, compared to 55% in 2020 and 33% in 2017. ▪️

The video business has increasingly come under the control of tech giants like Apple, Amazon and Google, which bury customer data and other key metrics in diffuse reports to the SEC. 

Other key operators, like DirecTV -- which was, not that long ago, the biggest pay TV company of them all -- have been recently spun off into private concerns from their publicly traded parent corporations, and are no longer beholden to any such quarterly scrutiny. (The OTT joint venture recently established by Comcast and Charter also falls into this spinoff bucket.)

Thus, when navel gazing over issues like cord cutting, estimates from third-party research companies -- hopefully well-founded! -- are all we have to go on. Amid that backdrop, Leichtman Research Group estimates that DirecTV lost around 400,000 customers across its DirecTV satellite, DirecTV virtual and U-verse TV platforms in the second quarter. 

LRG postulates that DirecTV, jointly owned by AT&T and private equity company TPG Capital, has around 13.9 million remaining subscribers. This is around 12 million fewer than existed between DirecTV satellite and U-verse back in May 2014, when AT&T agreed to pay $49 billion to buy DirecTV and -- briefly -- usurped Comcast to become the nation's No. 1 pay TV operator.

Pay TV's long secular slide started around the time of that purchase, dropping from just over 100 million American homes to around 72.2 million at the end of June, according to LRG. (The total is actually higher -- LRG's count doesn't include the 8% of the market served by vMVPD leader YouTube TV, as well as several hundred smaller regional cable companies.)

But we can say that, with its total pay TV subscriber base eroding by 46% over the last eight years, AT&T has at least managed to beat the market on something. 

By LRG's tally, every publicly effacing pay TV service once again lost ground in the second quarter, just as they did in Q1. The top 13 pay TV companies, accounting for 92% of U.S. customers, lost 1.950 million users from April - June vs. a pro forma loss of 1.235 million subscribers in the same period of 2021. 

Comcast was the biggest loser, bleeding 520,000 linear video customers. 

Notably, LRG doesn't yet feel it has the insight to properly gauge YouTube TV, for which Alphabet/Google recently touted 5 million customers. That makes Google the fourth largest pay TV operator, but the company doesn't disclose YouTube TV subscriber growth or retraction in quarterly earnings reports. 

The top seven U.S. cable companies experienced a first from April to June — they lost broadband customers in a quarter, 60,239 of them, according to Leichtman Research Group's quarterly tally of the U.S. wireline internet business. 

No. 1 MSO Comcast was flat in high-speed internet growth in Q2, while No. 2 company Charter Communications bled 21,000 customers and No. 3 company Altice USA lost 39,600 of them. 

According to LRG principal Bruce Leichtman, the lowest customer growth figure for wireline broadband that he can remember occurring in the last 20 years of tracking this business was the second quarter of 2009, the height of the Great Recession, when the leading MSOs only added 250,000 subs. 

For the first time that Next TV can recall, cable operators lost market share in the U.S. wireline business, slipping from 68.7% at the end of June compared to 69.6% after the second quarter of 2021. 

The new LRG tally highlights an abrupt braking for the U.S. cable industry, which grew customers by a record 1.4 million in Q2 2020, with quarantined customers outfitting their homes with broadband service en masse. Cable operators added over 843,000 HSI subscribers in the second quarter of 2021. (Note, LRG's tally is pro forma, given the changes to the individual companies in the consolidating telecom industry.)

What's changed?

Not so much the proliferation of fiber wireline by the telcos — they lost nearly 85,000 broadband users in Q2

Certainly, the emergence of fixed wireless access factored in -- T-Mobile and Verizon are seeing steady gains for their FWA services, which together picked up 816,000 subs in Q2. 

“Over the past year, there were about 3,260,000 net broadband adds, with fixed wireless services accounting for 56% of them," Leichtman said.

Perhaps more than anything, saturation in wireline broadband is occurring, with fixed services reaching as far as they feasibly can into rural regions. 

Overall fixed broadband services from the leading companies covering more than 95% of the U.S. market added around 670,000 customers in Q2 vs. over 890,000 in the same period last year. In 2020, the Q2 figure was 1.24 million added customers, with telco losses offsetting some of cable's massive gains. ▪️

The quarantine portion of the pandemic had a profound impact on the consumption habits of consumers, TV/video being among the most affected.

No surprise there. But what's striking is how quickly the phenomena matured the U.S. market in terms of video streaming.

According to the latest report from Leichtman Research Group (LRG), 87% of U.S. households now have a connected-TV device of some kind — for example, a Roku, an Amazon Fire TV player, a smart TV or even a connected Blu-ray player.

Also: Streaming Penetration Rises to 80% as Smaller Services Grow: Analyst

That penetration rate stood at just 80% two years ago and 69% as recently as 2017. It was just 38% in 2012.

Notably, LRG also found that smart-TV penetration has reached 71% of U.S. homes, up from 58% in 2020.

Across all U.S. households, the research company added, there is a mean of 3.9 devices per TV household, compared to 3.2 in 2020, and 2.4 in 2017.

Overall, 46% of adults in U.S. TV households watch video on a TV via a connected device daily, compared to 40% in 2020, 25% in 2017, and 4% in 2012.

The upshot of all of this: As more and more U.S. homes adopt the streaming habit, there are simply fewer new adopters available for companies like Netflix and Roku to assimilate, at least domestically.

LRG polled 1,902 U.S. consumers for its Connected TVs 2022 survey. ■

We've heard leading cable executives say over and over again the last few years that the wireless industry simply doesn't have the network capacity to compete for U.S. home broadband marketshare in a 5G world that's soon going to be usurped by cable's "10G" technology push.

But based on Leichtman Research Group's latest quarterly home broadband customer growth tracker, which factored in fixed wireless access (FWA) from wireless companies Verizon and T-Mobile for the first time, MSOs should probably be concerned. 

As LRG reveals, the two wireless companies added a combined 532,000 customers in Q1 for their new, largely 5G-enabled FWA home broadband services. The eight largest U.S. cable companies, meanwhile, added just 482,830 customers. That's 454,153 less than they added in the first quarter of 2021. 

Overall, LRG said the 14 biggest U.S. providers of high-speed internet service added around 1.065 million subscribers in Q1, up slightly over the 1.02 million tacked on by the biggest ISPs during the first three months of 2020. So, the overall narrow acceleration of growth can be directly tied to the pro forma addition of the two FWA services. Leave them out and we're having a very different discussion about how the U.S. home broadband business is saturated, and growth is slowing way, way down.

Share of the U.S. broadband market has steadily grown to around 70% for U.S. cable operators in recent years, with their "DOCSIS 3.0"-enabled download speeds vastly superior to what could be delivered by legacy DSL services provided by AT&T and Verizon. Consumers, who began to stream HD and 4K video en masse over the past half decade, switched over to cable ISPs in droves. 

But now the "telcos," who've made major investments in fiber-to-the-home infrastructure, are growing their high-speed internet customer bases again. And the addition of FWA is further tacking onto that customer growth. Verizon, for example, just reported its biggest customer-growth quarter for broadband in a decade, adding 229,000 combined bill-paying souls. 

Of course, we've yet to see what kind of performance Verizon and T-Mobile can deliver with fixed 5G in a world where there's more mass-scale adoption. The cable folks might be right about a network capacity shortfall at some point. But for a lot of consumers in the inflationary here and now, the speed just might be enough to Netflix and chill, especially considering the highly competitive $50-a-month pricing for FWA service. 

After Netflix’s disappointing first quarter — and another one due on the horizon — a general sense of panic that streaming video may not be what unseats traditional pay TV from its throne has enveloped the entire industry over the past few months. Wouldn’t it be an actual hoot if what saves Netflix and its broadband-delivered brethren ends up being something as mundane and dumb-pipe-like as fiber deployment?

Netflix said back in April that it lost about 200,000 global subscribers, its first quarterly loss ever, adding that it could lose another 2.5 million in Q2. At the same time cable and telcos are furiously building out fiber networks, fixed wireless access and 5G offerings across the country to close the broadband gap, mainly in rural markets. With that fiber deployment, fueled in part by billions of dollars of federal money, could come millions of new broadband customers itching to try out streaming for the first, or maybe the second or third time.

Netflix obviously has other problems — it has shed nearly $200 billion in market cap since December 31 as its stock price has fallen 71% and investor sentiment has literally done a 180-degree turn on the company. Investors who were unconcerned about the ever-escalating content spend (about $17 billion in 2021) as long as the subscriber growth trajectory was maintained, are now urging Netflix to close its wallet.  

And while Netflix stock has seen its ups and downs in the past, this time it was serious enough to force the company to embrace two things it has vehemently resisted in the past: offering a lower-priced ad-supported version and going after paying subscribers that share their passwords. According to reports, an ad-supported version of Netflix could come as soon as the fourth quarter of this year. 

 Fiber Blowout

Fiber deployment and construction are the new buzzwords in the cable and telco business, with AT&T claiming they will pass an additional 30 million customer locations with the technology by 2025. Cable operators are regularly extending their existing footprints with fiber — Comcast and Charter Communications are adding roughly 1 million homes per year through fiber edge-out programs — and smaller operators are constantly announcing new fiber builds. So far in May alone, nine small operators and telcos have announced plans to build fiber networks, with TDS Telecom pledging to pass an additional 160,000 homes with fiber this year and Wide Open West pledging $400 million to extend fiber to an additional 400,000 homes by 2027. 

Forget that there are still some questions as to whether there are enough skilled techs to actually build networks. Forget that these networks won’t be fully built for another five years at least.  Chances are if there wasn’t a worker shortage, the number of projects would be even greater — because nothing creates a growth surge more than money, and the federal government has earmarked $65 billion for network buildouts in areas they deem have insufficient broadband speeds. And even though a lot of those projects will be done in areas that have incumbent providers, more choice and higher speeds can only be good news for streaming service providers, right? 

Netflix obviously needs more subscribers. And cable operators, telcos and soon-to-be-Twitter owners are all spending huge amounts of cash to extend broadband services to rural areas. And since some of the customers in those markets don’t have Netflix or other SVOD services -- because you need broadband to stream video — that would appear to represent a pretty big untapped market. Maybe not hundreds of millions of people, but at least a few million. And every little million helps. 

Sounds pretty simple?

Some Gray Areas

Not really. Like everything else in the media business, there are some gray areas. 

Perhaps the grayest is just how many homes don’t have sufficient broadband. The federal government says there are 30 million people that live in areas that don’t have sufficient high-speed data, but doesn’t say how many homes that works out to be. And though DSL service may be a lot slower than cable broadband, with top residential  speed of 100 Megabits per second vs. 1 Gigabit per second for cable, it’s still fast enough to stream video. So technically, truly new broadband customers — those who have never had broadband and therefore, SVOD — are probably pretty few. 

That’s what  Leichtman Group president Bruce Leichtman thinks. Sure, he said in a recent interview, new fiber builds may attract some new subscribers to Netflix, but it will be a marginal amount. More likely, he added, is that a combination of faster networks, lower prices for ad-supported streaming and the advent of free ad-supported TV (FAST) could present an opportunity to convince customers in those areas to subscribe to other SVOD services.

“I think it's an opportunity, but it’s more of a gradual opportunity,” Leichtman said of the fiber build’s impact on Netflix and other SVOD providers. “Remember, they have to build these markets, and the building takes a while. And we’re talking about the 86th percentile. These are not the early adopters that we’re talking about.”

But Growth is Growth, Isn’t It?

Although there has been a lot of talk about the slowdown in broadband growth, it’s still growing. Leichtman believes that one of the biggest catalysts for Netflix and other streaming services would be a return to new housing growth, which has been stagnant throughout the pandemic. New homes means new subscribers for broadband as well as SVOD services.

“While the breadth [of the SVOD market] is mature, the depth will continue to grow,” Leichtman said. “That means more services per household.” 

LightShed Partners expects total broadband subscriber additions to be fairly constant over the next three years: 3.5 million in 2022, 3.3 million in 2023, 3.2 million in 2024 and 3.2 million in 2025. 

At the same time, traditional pay TV losses are accelerating. Wells Fargo Securities media analyst Steven Cahall estimated that traditional pay TV lost 2.2 million subscribers in Q1, 400,000 more than in the same period last year. 

Our own Next TV estimated that cord cutting accelerated 31% in Q1, due mainly to losses at virtual MVPDs and satellite TV service providers.    

MyBundle.TV CEO and founder Jason Cohen said what some observers are missing is that broadband is still growing.

“That’s the piece of the puzzle that the streaming marketplace isn’t very focused on,” Cohen said, adding that his company has nearly tripled its number of broadband partners from 31 in June 2021 to 90 currently, including many small market ISPs that are bringing broadband to people for the first time.

“Some of these people still don’t have Netflix,” Cohen said. “Is there another 100 million households for Netflix to gain in the US? No. But we’re talking about, on the margin, there are millions left. If you're talking about the smaller streaming services, there are still tens of millions [of subscribers] to gain. There's a lot of investment happening to bring more broadband to the table.”

Streaming is Not Dead 

Cohen bristles at those who claim streaming is dead, pointing to the roughly 68 million households who spend about $120 per month on traditional linear pay TV subscriptions. (That’s $98 billion annually, for those without a calculator) Those ranks are definitely going to deplete as those homes cut the cord, but that doesn’t mean they are going to start reading books and learning how to play the piano for entertainment. They’re going to stream video, either through a service they already have or via one to which they will soon subscribe.

“This idea that streaming is saturated we think is 100% incorrect. Those dollars are going to be shifting from those cable bills. Whatever it is, more broadband means there is going to be more streaming,” Cohen said, adding that consumers unwilling to pay $15 per month for a streaming service may be attracted to paying $9.99 for an ad-supported one.

Netflix won’t be alone in its ad-supported efforts. Others like HBO Max — which introduced its ad-carrying version in June 2021 -- Paramount Plus, and NBCUniversal’s Peacock all have introduced AVOD tiers to varying degrees of success. Disney Plus said it would launch a lower-priced ad-supported version later this year.

Disney Plus added 7.9 million new customers worldwide in fiscal Q2, exceeding analysts’ consensus estimates of 5.9 million additions. Including its Hulu, ESPN Plus, and Disney Plus Hotstar brands, total customer additions were about 9.2 million in the period. But the company warned that because the first half of the year came in so much better than expectations, the second half may not be as strong.

“...[T]he first half came in better than expected, so that delta that we had initially anticipated may not be as large,” Disney chief financial officer Christine McCarthy said on a conference call with analysts Wednesday to discuss quarterly results. “But we still do expect an increase in the second half to exceed the first half.”  

The push towards AVOD is a logical next step for streaming, and could ease the pressure to spend heavily on new content just from the nature of the business model. With AVOD, the longer a consumer watches, the more money the service makes, while the absence of advertising means as consumers burn through shows, more content has to be created to keep their attention. 

FAST and Furious 

At the same time, free, ad-supported TV (FAST) services like Paramount’s Pluto TV, Fox’s Tubi TV, the Roku Channel and others are becoming the fastest growing segment in the streaming universe. Pluto TV has about 68 million monthly active users, Tubi about 51 million and indications are that the segment will continue to soar as new players enter the fray. 

Cohen added that the FAST segment is where he believes the ad dollars once earmarked for linear networks will go, adding that MyBundle.TV is building a FAST component into its platform to take advantage of that growth.

“We know people want free TV, they want to pay for no adds, they're willing to pay less to get ads, and then some of them are willing to lean back and say, ‘You know what, I’m willing to take a little bit lower quality content so I can flip through channels,’ ” Cohen said. “Whether it's Pluto or Tubi, you name it, there's a real market for that free TV.”

MyBundle.TV obviously is in the position to take advantage of the shift in how programming is delivered, and Cohen believes that his service, which enables customers to navigate the growing number of streaming services to find the content they want to watch, will become even more valuable as choices increase and traditional linear bundles erode. 

That is even more true today as the number of services increases and the sheer amount of available programming balloons. Tubi alone has a content library with more than 40,000 titles. And as more and more content providers are focusing on originals and other exclusive shows, finding programming across the various streaming services can almost become a full-time job.  

It’s About Aggregation, Not Consolidation

“It’s not what I’m paying for my apps, it’s what am I getting out of it,” Cohen said. “Right now if I subscribe to an app and I'm not going to it to find the content and I’m not finding new shows or movies, then that might be a problem. There’s a lot of content out there, and a lot of good content, on multiple different streaming services. … By helping consumers discover new shows and movies across their services there's another way to increase that value.”

“To me, it’s not streamer vs streamer, it’s still streaming vs the $160 billion [in revenue] between the subscriptions and the advertising that is still spent by advertisers on traditional linear TV,” Cohen continued. “That money is shifting over through this new delivery mechanism that is streaming.”

And Cohen believes that the industry can support more streamers, just as long as there are simple ways for consumers to access the content they want.   

“I think that ultimately our view of the market, there doesn't need to be consolidation, but there needs to be aggregation,” Cohen said. “There needs to be a way for consumers to more simply navigate this process. We think this because the way that consumers build their own bundle that will still include Netflix, that will still include these other big services, as well as the niche services for people’s  interests. 

The pay TV industry is not blind to the need for aggregation either. Comcast and Charter Communications unveiled a joint venture earlier this month that would serve as a streaming platform for its broadband-only customers, one that could easily become a streaming app aggregator.

Cohen acknowledged that larger pay TV companies will likely go on their own when it comes to app aggregation. But he added there is plenty of room for the smaller guys, adding that there is a growing number of ISPs with 200,000 or 300,000 subscribers that would welcome help. 

“We do not think Comcast is going to be using MyBundle.TV,” Cohen said. “But for everybody else, we view ourselves as that aggregator. We consider ourselves the streaming aggregator for the broadband industry.” ■

Netflix password sharing is bad, but it's not that bad. 

That's the essential takeaway from a new Leichtman Research Group (LRG) survey of 4,400 U.S. households, which found that 33% of Netflix users share an account.

The data conflicts with another recent survey of 10,400 adults, conducted by the Advertising Research Foundation, which found that 49% of subscribers share their Netflix password with someone living outside their home. 

LRG's Internet-Delivered Pay-TV Services 2022 study breaks up that 33% of password sharers with the following behavior classifications. Editor's note: We made some clarifications after speaking to Leichtman principal Bruce Leichtman on Wednesday morning:

> 15% of Netflix services "are used and paid for by those that also share them with someone outside the household." These are the paid subscribers who do the sharing of their passwords with folks outside their home.

> 15% of Netflix services "are used in one household but are borrowed from another household that is paying for the service." These are the non-paying people who "borrow" the Netflix account of someone not living with them (aka the freeloaders).

> 3% of services "are used by multiple households that share the subscription cost."

> 3% of Netflix services "are not paid for because they come with another service."

The issue of Netflix password sharing has come up quite a bit of late, following Netflix's disclosure two weeks ago that it's testing in Latin America a new billing scheme that adds around $3 to the monthly bill for subscribers who share their Netflix password. 

Of course, password sharing is endemic to other direct-to-consumer streaming services. Overall, 29% of DTC subscriptions are shared with users outside the home. 

“Password sharing is an inherent feature of most streaming services," said LRG principal Bruce Leichtman in a statement. "Sharing helps to expand the user base and retain customers, but it also creates a gap between the number of households that have a service and actual paying subscribers. For example, about two-thirds of U.S. households report having Netflix, but this includes about 10% of U.S. households that don’t pay for the service because it is borrowed from someone else’s subscription.”

The DirecTV-branded pay TV platforms spun off by AT&T into a joint venture with private equity firm TPG in August lost a combined 412,000 subscribers in the third quarter, Leichtman Research Group estimates. 

Starting with its own third quarter earnings report, AT&T no longer reports subscriber metrics for DirecTV satellite TV, DirecTV Stream (formerly AT&T TV) and AT&T U-verse TV (which is no longer sold to new customers). 

Overall, the top U.S. pay TV operators lost a combined 650,000 customers in Q3, with Comcast, which bled 407,000 subscribers, experiencing the second most heaviest losses. 

The virtual MVPD category actually saw solid growth in the third quarter, with Hulu + Live TV adding 300,000 customers, and Sling TV (+117,000) and fuboTV (+262,884) up, as well. Leichtman didn't render an estimate for category leader YouTube TV.

LRG president and principal analyst Bruce Leichtman told Next TV that while YouTube TV parent only sporadically releases vMVPD customer metrics, AT&T's copious data on DirecTV and AT&T TV in the run-up to the spinoff provided a sound foundation to render an estimate. 

The cable sector, however, experienced accelerated losses of over 700,000 customers, compared to 380,000 in Q3 2020, when the cable business was still bundling TV with all the new broadband subscriptions it was selling amid the pandemic quarantine. 

Overall, the top operators representing 93% of the market have 77 million remaining linear video customers.

Now here, look at this chart:

The top U.S. providers of wireline high-speed internet service collectively reported additions of just 630,000 customers in the third quarter, down significantly from the pandemic-fueled third quarter of 2020, when the business explosively grew by 1.525 million subscribers, according to the latest Leichtman Research Group figures. 

Third-quarter growth still exceeded expansion in Q3 of 2019 (615,000 customers) and Q3 of 2018 (600,000).

Of the 107.9 million wireline broadband customers in the U.S. as of Sept. 30, cable companies accounted for 70% of them. 

“Broadband additions returned to pre-pandemic levels in the third quarter of 2021,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc.  “The top broadband providers added significantly fewer subscribers than in last year’s third quarter, but had a similar number of net adds as in 3Q 2019 and 3Q 2018.”

LRG figures account for the top operators representing 96% of the market. Not included in the data is insight on the nascent fixed wireless business, which could challenge the cable industry's dominance of wireline broadband in the coming years. 

The percentage of U.S. TV homes subscribing to a pay TV service has dropped to 71%, down from 82% in 2016 and 87% in 2011, according to a new report from Leichtman Research Group (LRG). 

Not surprisingly, LRG's Pay TV in the U.S. 2021 report finds that pay TV consumption is somewhat generational: of the 2,000 U.S. households polled, 77% still subscribe to a linear video service, while only 64% of those ages 18-44 do. 

Also notable:

> 41% of respondents who have moved in the last year don't have pay TV, a higher percentage than in previous years, according to LRG.

> 66% of non-pay TV subscribers have cut the cord at some point, while 34% have never had service at all. 

> 54% of those who have never had service are age 18-34. 

> 37% of all TV sets use a traditional pay T set-top vs. 58% in 2016.

> 40% of adults age 18-34 think it's OK to use a friend's account and authentication to watch a live TV service. 

“The penetration of pay-TV remains lowest among younger adults and the categories that they tend to populate, including movers and renters,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc.

The three biggest subscription video-on-demand services, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu, have been adopted by 78% of U.S. households, a percentage that is flat with a comparable 2020 survey, according to Leichtman Research Group (LRG). 

Only 41% of U.S. households report streaming one of these Big 3 services daily compared to 40% last year. 

Polling 2,000 adult U.S. consumers earlier this summer for its latest Emerging Video Services 2021 report, LRG did find that respondents who said they had more than one of the legacy Big 3 SVODs did shoot up from 55% in 2020 to 58% this year. 

But the huge annual adoption leaps previously taken by these top three subscription streaming services--household penetration in 2016 was only 59%, for example--appear, for now, to be done. (Notable was Netflix's disclosure that it actually lost 400,000 U.S. subscribers in the second quarter.)

So what gives? Is the rapid proliferation of the video streaming habit petering out? Are new competitors taking some of the wind out of the sails of legacy operators? 

In an email exchange, LRG principal analyst Bruce Leichtman noted that the addition of Disney Plus (which ranks just behind Hulu in U.S. subscriber stature with around 38 million customers), along with HBO Max, incrementally increases overall U.S. SVOD adoption by just 2% to 80%. (Yes, there aren't many subscribers to these newer services who also don't take one of the legacy Big 3 subscription streaming services.)

Adding the nine SVOD services that rank below Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Disney Plus and HBO Max only increased total adoption by another 2% to 82%, Leichtman noted.

U.S. SVOD households report supporting more services than ever--53% currently pay for three more more.

But this notion that the emergence of Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus, HBO Max, Peacock, Discovery Plus, Paramount Plus et. al. is massively increasing the overall SVOD pie is perhaps overstated. 

“The percent of households with a top SVOD service held steady in 2021, and those using any of these services daily also levelled off after being pulled forward last year due to the coronavirus pandemic,” Leichtman said in a statement.  “While the breadth of households with a major SVOD service is similar to last year, those with multiple top SVOD services continued to expand. And, including eleven additional streaming video services, 27% of households now report having five or more SVOD or DTC services.”

The top 13 U.S. pay TV operators, accounting for around 95% of the market, lost 1.23 million subscribers in the second quarter, an 18% improvement over the 1.5 million bled out in the same period of 2020, according to Leichtman Research Group (LRG).

AT&T, which recently spun off its pay TV operation in a joint venture with private equity firm TPG, once again drove the market, nearly halving its losses year over year to 473,000--the factor perhaps most responsible for the overall industry's improved metrics. 

But save for the surprising Q2 performance by Dish virtual MVPD Sling TV (up 65,000 customers) and the deficit-fueled growth of fellow virtual service fuboTV (up 91,291 subscribers), every other major service was down in the quarter. 

And save for AT&T, there were no major improvements. 

Top cable operator Comcast, for example, reported the loss of 399,000 video customers in the second quarter, an improvement over the 478,000 shed in Q2 of 2020. But No. 2 cable operator Charter Communications lost 50,000 TV customers after gaining 94,000 in the second quarter of last year--a strange dynamic the company attributed to customers frantically adding broadband as they entered quarantine, many of them tacking on linear pay TV service, sold on promotion, in the process. 

And satellite TV got a little worse, too. DirecTV's figures are buried within AT&T's bundled "premium TV" reporting, a monolith that also includes AT&T TV and U-verse TV. But Dish Network lost 132,000 customers in Q2, vs. just 40,000 in the year-ago quarter. 

And despite Sling TV and fuboTV getting into the green in Q2, the vMVPD business barely grew, as well, with market leader Hulu + Live TV shedding 100,000 customers in the quarter. (Notably, LRG doesn't include YouTube TV, but parent company Google/Alphabet didn't say anything about the OTT service growing customers in its second quarter earnings report last month.)

On Monday, fuboTV CEO David Gandler made the bold prediction during a CNBC appearance that his service, which is integrating sports betting features, will add 5 million subscribers by the end of 2026.

But there are plenty of skeptics out there. German research company Statista, for example, predicts that the overall pay TV business will decline to around 60 million subscribers by 2025, which would be around 60% of the base it enjoyed just a decade prior. 

The U.S. wireline broadband business has slowed from the explosive growth it experienced during the outset of the COVID-19 quarantine, but not by much. 

According to Q2 figures published by Leichtman Research Group (LRG), the top 16 wirelines broadband providers, accounting for 96% of the U.S. market, added 890,000 customers in the second quarter vs. 1.260 million in the second quarter of 2020, as citizens worldwide adjusted their home internet service to account for sheltering-in-place activities. 

But discounting that Q2 2020 anomaly, it was still the U.S. wireline broadband business' biggest growth quarter in a decade. 

Cable operators continued their torrid growth pace, with top U.S. MSO Comcast adding 354,000 high-speed internet customers in Q2, while No. 2 cable company Charter Communications tacked on 400,000.

Overall, the nine biggest U.S. cable operators added 842,447 HSI customers in Q2 and are now within half a percentage point of controlling 70% of the U.S. wireline broadband market. 

Within LRG's figures for "wireline phone companies, it's unclear how much growth the nascent wireless home internet businesses currently being set up by wireless operators like Verizon and T-Mobile are providing.

Certainly, these newer 5G-fueled operations don't seem to be slowing the uptake of cable broadband at the moment. 

In terms of phone company wireline, AT&T (up 46,000 customers in Q2) and Verizon (up 70,000) continue to add fiber-to-the-home customers, but others including CenturyLink and Frontier remain in decline. Overall, the wireline phone provider segment added only 49,078 customers during the three-month period ending June 30. 

This is not the way all these pointy headed OTT studies we’ve published ad nauseam over the last decade-plus are supposed to work!

A new Leichtman Research Group (LRG) study said the percentage of U.S. TV households connecting their TV to the internet to watch video has gone down this year, narrowly at least, to 39% from 40% in the pandemic 2020. 

“Use of connected TV devices leveled off over the past year after being pulled forward due to the coronavirus pandemic last year,” said Bruce Leichtman, principal analyst for LRG.

Indeed, 2020’s level was a significant bump from the 31% of homes in 2019 found by LRG to watch video via a connected TV gadget, the 19% reported in 2016 and the 3% reported in 2011.

Other data in LRG’s Connected TVs 2021 report seem to maintain the status quo in terms of the industry's upward trajectory.

The report said that 82% of U.S. TV homes have at least one internet-connected TV device, such as a Roku box or streaming-enabled gaming console, vs. 80% in 2020, 74% in 2019, 65% in 2016 and 30% in 2011.

LRG also said that 60% of adults watch video via a connected TV device at least weekly, compared to 59% in 2020, 52% in 2019, 40% in 2016, and 10% in 2011.

The top 13 operators in the U.S. pay TV ecosystem collectively shed over 1.895 million subscribers in the first quarter, just slightly less than the 2.065 million customers that went missing in Q1 2020, according to data published by Leichtman Research Group.

The only real improvement, if you choose to call it that, occurred at AT&T, where the telco lost 620,000 across its various satellite, traditional QAM and IP pay TV platforms, vs. nearly 1,100 in the first quarter of last year. 

But cord cutting got worse for Comcast, where Q1 losses were up 20% to 491,000, and virtual platform Hulu + Live TV, which lost 200,000 customers in the quarter vs. a gain of 100,000 in Q1 2020. 

A LRG-supplied chart detailing the entire Q1 cord-cutting picture follows further down on this cluttered page. 

The sharp pandemic-fueled growth in broadband customers appears to be ebbing, just a little, for the top U.S. cable operators. 

The eight biggest MSOs collectively added nearly 937,000 broadband customers in the first quarter. It was the first time the U.S. cable industry didn’t reach the 1 million mark in high-speed internet customer growth since the pre-pandemic fourth quarter of 2019, according to data compiled by Leichtman Research Group (LRG). 

Comcast added 460,000 HSI customers in Q1, down 3.5% from the 477,000 it added in the first quarter of 2020. No. 2 operator Charter Communications saw a sharper decline in first quarter growth, decelerating by 39% to 355,000, LRG said. 

Adding the top eight wireline phone companies to the mix, the top 16 U.S. broadband providers collectively added 1,020,907 users to their ranks, with both AT&T (51,000) and Verizon (64,000) growing in Q1. That's about 87% of the growth in Q1 of 2020 (1.17 million), LRG said.

“This marked the fourth time in the past five quarters that there were more than one million net broadband additions in the U.S.,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc. “Over the past year, there were about 4,665,000 net broadband adds, compared to about 2,760,000 net broadband adds over the prior year.”

About 27% of all paid video service subscriptions in the U.S. are shared with others outside the household, according to Leichtman Research Group.

And around 16% of U.S. households use at least one subscription streaming video service that they don’t pay for. 

The data comes at a time of increased awareness about the issue of password sharing. Netflix is looking at ways to clamp down on those who crib passwords from friends and family members. And Citi recently revealed estimates that password sharing costs U.S. streaming companies $25 billion annually—and Netflix $6 billion specifically. 

For its latest report, Internet-Delivered Pay-TV Services 2021, LRG said it surveyed a robust cohort of 6,262 adult U.S. consumers. 

“Password sharing is prevalent throughout the streaming video industry,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for LRG, in a statement. “Over a quarter of DTC streaming video services are shared with others outside the household, including 12% of all services that are ‘borrowed’ from someone else’s subscription. Yet, sharing of streaming services should not solely be viewed as lost revenue, as the ability to share with others is also part of the retention strategy for the services.”

LRG also found that 82% of U.S. homes now have at least one of the top 11 direct-to-consumer  and subscription video services. And 51% of have at least three of these services.

Further punctuating what has become the disastrous aftermath of AT&T’s $49 billion purchase of DirecTV in 2015, the platform lost 3.033 million customers last year, according to Leichtman Research Group (LRG) estimates. 

LRG’s quarterly U.S. pay TV customer tally now covers 16 cable, satellite, telco and virtuL MVPD platforms, covering 95% of the U.S. market. Leaving out only a few vMVPDs that don’t report data—notably, YouTube TV and Philo—LRG said the U.S pay TV market lost about 5.12 million net video subscribers in 2020, compared to a pro forma net loss of about 4.795 million in 2019.

It was, as has already been reported, cord cutting’s worst year. Ever. 

And AT&T made it a whole lot worse. 

AT&T combines reporting for DirecTV, legacy service U-verse TV and recently launched IP-based platform AT&T TV into one line item it calls “premium TV.” With AT&T now prioritizing AT&T TV, bundling it with wireline fiber broadband for instance, LRG suggests that the new platform’s growth narrowly offset the decline of U-verse, which is no longe being sold. 

AT&T recently combined its AT&T TV Now virtual MVPD service with AT&T TV, but the vMVPD’s customer performance was broken out for all of 2020, producing a somewhat significant loss of 270,000 customers for the year. AT&T ceased steep discounts for its skinny bundle back in late 2018, when it was nearly at 2 million customers, and it’s been bleeding out ever since then. 

LRG, meanwhile, attempts to break off DirecTV entirely, estimating that the satellite TV unit accounts for most of AT&T’s staggering video customer losses. 

Of the 16 pay TV platforms surveyed in LRG’s 2020 tally, 11 reported losses for the year, totaling 6.249 million customers. DirecTV’s 3.033 million lost customers accounted for 49% of that total. Combined, AT&T’s total pay TV losses across DirecTV and AT&T TV Now total more than 3.3 million customers and account for nearly 53% of total pay customer losses. 

AT&T and its DirecTV operation accounted for even a greater share of pay TV’s losses in 2019, 62%, with the telecom’s four pay TV platforms combining to lose nearly 4.1 million customers.

AT&T is currently in the process of spinning off its entire pay TV operation, valuing it at around $16.25 billion and selling a minority stake to private equity company TPG. It’s quite a notable distraction of wealth and consumer good will. 

What would happen if the broader U.S. pay TV industry were to spin off AT&T’s pay TV assets, too?

Not factoring in AT&T platforms, the remaining services in LRG’s survey yielded a net loss of around 1.857 million customers for 2020. If you also factor AT&T’s huge losses out of 2019’s LRG equation, total cord cutting came in only at around 796,000 that year. So customers losses effectively more than doubled for the rest of the linear bundled video business last year, but the aggregate numbers don’t appear quite so staggering. 

Due to corporate mergers, as well as changes to counting methods and companies being included in its tally, LRG’s principal, Bruce Leichtman, understandably discourages we data science wannabes from going too crazy with year-over-year comparisons of his quarterly reports. 

But with AT&T out of the way, we can more clearly make some inferences as to what’s happening to a mature business that’s eroding more quickly these days. 

Leichtman tallied the same seven cable companies in his year-end 2019 and 2020 reports, and cable TV customer losses accelerated 23% to 1.916 million last year. Since the bigger cable companies on the list haven’t forsaken video the way smaller operators have, the TV losses are probably more significant across the broader cable industry. It’s notable that Comcast, which is still pouring plenty of water on its X1 platform, lost more than 1.4 million linear pay TV customers in 2020. 

Charter Communications gained 56,000 Spectrum TV customers last year, with many of the additions coming along with a pandemic-fueled record 2.215 million broadband customer adds. Charter signed up so many high-speed internet customers last year that having just a marginal percentage of them also choose to take traditional linear video on two-year promotion put the company in the black on video customer growth. 

The result might have been different had Charter been able to offer those customers a product like Xfinity Flex, the OTT device Comcast hands out for free to broadband-only customers. Speaking to investors earlier this week at a Morgan Stanley event, Charter Chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge acknowledged that the company’s priorities are shifting to inexpensive products that better ease the sale of connectivity services. 

Also notable: Dish Network’s satellite losses stabilized— the the unit lost 408,000 customers in 2020 after bleeding out 511,000 in 2019. And vMVPD growth flattened, with market leader Hulu gaining only 800,000 customers vs. 1.5 million in 2019. 

The eight biggest U.S. cable companies collectively added 4.819 million wireline broadband customers in 2020 and now control approximately 69% of the U.S. fixed internet market. 

According to Leichtman Research Group (LRG), the 4.86 million total fixed broadband customers added last year by the 16 largest providers, accounting for 96% of the U.S. market, was the most since 2008. 

Telco operators, which are still mostly in the process of ramping up fixed 5G services, collectively added only 39,535 customers to the total. Verizon led all telco providers with 173,000 customer additions. 

The pandemic year customer growth performance represented a 190% uptick over the industry’s 2019 expansion. 

Charter Communications alone added 2.215 million customer in 2020, followed by Comcast, which added 1.971 million broadband subscribers. 

Analyst Bruce Leichtman, who has been tracking the U.S. broadband industry since 2001, said he can’t remember a time when cable’s share of the market was bigger. 

“With the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, there were more net broadband additions in 2020 than in any year since 2008,” he said. “The top cable and telco broadband providers in the U.S. cumulatively added about 4,860,000 subscribers in 2020, compared to about 5,100,000 subscribers in 2018 and 2019 combined.”

Culminating a decade in which internet usage in general dramatically increased among U.S. consumers, Leichtman Research Group said 59% of U.S. adults with home internet service watched video online daily last year.

That’s a marked increase over the 50% who reported daily internet video usage in 2019, and the 14% who reported daily usage back in 2010. 

Indeed, a lot has changed in 10 years. 

Surveying 1,076 U.S. households for its Broadband Internet in the U.S. 2020 report, LRG said that 86% of U.S. homes now have internet service, vs. just 74% in 2010. 

But pandemic-era consumption habits have changed a lot in just 12 months, too, with self-reported time spent online at home jumping from 3.7 hours per day in 2019 to 5.3 hours in 2020. 

“The percentage of households getting an Internet service home, including households with a high-speed broadband Internet  service, continued to increase over the past year, and is now higher than in any previous year,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, in a statement. “Internet usage at home also reached an all-time high this year.  With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the reported mean time spent online at home per day among adults increased by over an hour and a half from a year ago.”

Did the U.S. pay TV business just break even—or actually grow—in the third quarter?

More precisely, did the impressive third-quarter customer expansion of virtual MVPDs, which collectively added more than 1 million subscribers in the three-month period ending Sept. 30, completely offset the sustained losses of linear pay video services?

After observing Leichtman Research Group’s third-quarter pay TV report, which tallied the performances of the top 16 platforms covering about 95% of the market, it looks very possible. Even likely. 

According to LRG, the seven biggest cable operators, the two major satellite TV companies, and the three largest telco outfits collectively shed just over 1.15 million linear pay TV subscribers in the third quarter. 

But virtual pay TV services had a big growth quarter, with Disney-controlled Hulu Plus Live TV (added 700,000 customers in Q3), Sling TV (up 203,000) and fubo TV (added 169,000) offsetting AT&T TV Now’s narrow losses of 37,000 customers, collectively tacking on 1.035 million paid users.

By LRG’s total quarterly count, the U.S. pay TV business’s top 16 services shed around 120,000 subscribers. 

But there are a few very, very strongly legal “absentee ballots” still left to tally.

Since Google doesn’t reveal the quarterly subscriber performance of YouTube TV, the second biggest vMVPD service this side of Hulu Plus Live TV, LRG doesn’t include the platform in its quarterly reports. 

However, Google did reveal that YouTube TV surpassed 3 million users in Q3, and that it has added 1 million subscribers, all told, in 2020. Is it safe to assume that YouTube TV grew by more than 120,000 paid users in the third quarter?

Yeah, probably pretty safe.

“YouTube TV likely had similar net adds to Hulu in the quarter, possibly 500,000-750,000, but we don’t know for sure because they don’t release quarterly numbers,” LRG principal analyst Bruce Leichtman said in an email exchange this morning.

There are many small cable operators out there still in the video business, occupying much of the 5% of the market not covered by LRG’s report. And it’s probably safe to assume that most of them lost TV customers in Q3. 

“But YouTube gains would far more than make up for those losses and make it a positive quarter overall,” Leichtman added.

And there are other vMVPDs not counted in the LRG tally, as well, including startup Philo, which said it grew past the 800,000 customer marker recently. (Philo also doesn’t release quarterly growth metrics.)

Of course, these raw customer metrics don’t fully describe the aggregate economic health of the traditional, bundled video channel business we call pay TV, with profit margins on virtual services only a fraction of linear. 

But it might portend a future in which the traditional channel bundle survives longer than expected?

AT&T TV Growing … Narrowly?

AT&T reported a net loss of 590,000 subscribers in Q3 across its “premium” video brands, a grouping that includes satellite platform DirecTV, sunsetting legacy service U-verse TV and the new IP-delivered AT&T TV. 

Also read: AT&T Pay TV Losses ‘Slow’ to 627K in Q3

AT&T didn’t break out the individual performances of the premium pay TV portfolio, but Leichtman included some interesting estimates in his report. 

Notably, LRG estimated that DirecTV shed around 690,000 customers in Q3.

AT&T has stopped taking new signups for U-verse TV. Factoring in that legacy platform's Q3 losses and the new AT&T TV platform's gains, LRG estimates additions of around 100,000 between the two. 

The U.S. wireline broadband business continued its rapid pandemic-fueled customer expansion in the third quarter, with the leading providers adding 1.53 million subscribers, the industry’s best growth since the first quarter of 2009.

In all, services that deliver the internet through cable, fiber or DSL added 915,000 more customers than they did in the third quarter of 2019, according to Leichtman Research Group (LRG), which tallied the performances of the top 16 ISPs covering 96% of the U.S. market. 

The leading cable operators continued their incendiary growth, adding 1.32 million customers in Q3—down slightly on a sequential basis from the nearly 1.4 million they added in Q2, but up big from around 832,000 adds in the third quarter last year. Comcast’s 633,000 net adds in Q3 were more than in any quarter in the past 15 years.

The differentiating factor in Q3 2020 was the return to growth for AT&T (added 174,000 subscribers) and Verizon (up 110,000), with both companies gaining momentum with their fiber-to-the-home offerings. 

The top wireline phone companies added about 210,000 subscribers in the third quarter, compared to a net loss of about 220,000 subscribers in Q3 2019.

On a pro forma basis, this was only the second quarter since Q1 2016 that telcos have had positive net adds.  The last quarter when they had more net adds was in Q1 2013.  

“With the continued impact of the coronavirus pandemic, there were more quarterly net broadband additions in 3Q 2020 than in any quarter in over eleven years,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for LRG, in a statement  “Over the past year, there were about 4,550,000 net broadband adds, compared to about 2,550,000 net broadband adds over the prior year.  This marks the most broadband net adds in a year since 3Q 2008-2Q 2009.”

U.S. TV consumption has crossed an important threshold, with households more likely to rely on only streaming than exclusively use pay TV.

According to the latest Leichtman Research Group’s report, 20% of U.S. homes pay for at least one subscription VOD streaming service but not a pay TV platform. Conversely, only 14% of U.S. homes pay for a cable, satellite or telco channel bundle, but don’t have an SVOD service. 

In the 18th iteration of LRG’s Pay TV in the U.S. report, the company found that 74% of U.S. households still have pay TV of some kind, whether it be cable or a virtual MVPD. This compares to 85% in 2015, 88% in 2010 and 82% in 2005.

Notably, 38% of those that moved in the past year do not currently get a pay-TV service – a higher level than in any previous year.

In all, 60% of U.S. homes have both linear pay TV and SVOD. Six percent of homes have neither pay TV or SVOD. 

Among traditional linear pay TV users, 79% also have an SVOD service. And 96% of homes getting linear pay TV from an internet-delivered service (vMVPD) have an SVOD service like Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime Video. 

“Traditional pay-TV services from cable, satellite, and Telco providers are now in less than two-thirds of U.S households, while an increasing number of households are opting to get live pay-TV from Internet-delivered vMVPD services,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc. “Consumers continue to choose the video services that best fit their households’ needs.  For 60% of households, this includes both pay-TV and SVOD services.”

The top 16 U.S. wireline broadband providers, representing 96% of the market, added 1.245 million customers in the pandemic-fueled second quarter, according to figures released by Leichtman Research Group.

It was the biggest customer growth period for that industry since the first quarter of 2012, LRG said.

Led by Charter Communications’ subsidy-spurred growth of 850,000 high-speed internet users, the leading eight cable broadband providers added nearly 1.4 million broadband customers in the second quarter. They now jointly control more than 68% of U.S. wireline broadband subscribers.

No. 1 U.S. cable company Comcast added 323,000 high-speed internet (HSI) customers in the second quarter.

AT&T (down 114,000 wireline HSD customers), Verizon (down 23,000), CenturyLink (down 29,000) and Frontier Communications (down 41,000) were part of a phone company contingent that jointly lost nearly 156,000 customers in Q2, according to LRG. 

The top 16 U.S. wireline broadband providers, representing 96% of the market, added 1.245 million customers in the pandemic-fueled second quarter, according to figures released by Leichtman Research Group. 

It was the biggest customer growth period for that industry since the first quarter of 2012, LRG said. 

Led by Charter Communications’ subsidy-spurred growth of 850,000 high-speed internet users, the leading eight cable broadband providers added nearly 1.4 million broadband customers in the second quarter. They now jointly control more than 68% of U.S. wireline broadband subscribers. 

No. 1 U.S. cable company Comcast added 323,000 high-speed internet (HSI) customers in the second quarter. 

AT&T (down 114,000 wireline HSD customers), Verizon (down 23,000), CenturyLink (down 29,000) and Frontier Communications (down 41,000) were part of a phone company contingent that jointly lost nearly 156,000 customers in Q2, according to LRG. 

The portion of U.S. homes equipped with at least one smart TV, standalone streaming device or connected gaming system has reached 80%, according to Leichtman Research Group (LRG).

That figure is up from 74% in 2018, 57% in 2015 and 24% in 2010. 

Overall, 40% of U.S. TV homes watch connected TV video on a daily basis, vs. 29% in 2018, 12% in 2015 and 1% in 2010.

Among adults 55 and older, 18% watch connected TV daily, vs. 48% for adults 35-54, and 55% for adults 18-34.  

Among connected device households, 64% have three more more OTT devices, and 58% have  a connected smart GV—vs. 47% in 2018, 22% in 2015 and 8% in 2010. 

Drilling down further, 56% of TV homes have at least one standalone streaming device—Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, etc.—vs. 46% in 2018, 23% in 2015 and 3% in 2011.

LRG’s survey is based on 2,000 U.S. TV homes. 

“The data in this study indicate that there are now nearly 400 million connected TV devices in U.S. TV households. This is an increase from about 250 million connected TV devices in 2016.  And these totals do not even include pay-TV set-top boxes that can be used to access content from the Internet,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for LRG, in a statement. “Along with this increase in the number of devices, the percent of adults in the U.S. using these connected devices to watch video on a TV each day has more than doubled—growing from nineteen to forty percent—in just the past four years."

How bad was it? Pretty, pretty bad.

The U.S. pay TV business lost about 2.065 million customers in the first quarter, its worst quarterly subscriber performance ever, according to Leichtman Research Group (LRG).

From cable to satellite, from telco to virtual MVPD, every sector of the pay TV industry is in recession.

The top seven cable companies lost about 595,000 video subscribers in the first quarter, compared to a loss of about 335,000 subscribers in Q1 2019. The biggest loser was Comcast, which shed 409,000 linear video customers.

Since AT&T didn’t break out which of its 897,000 lost linear video souls belonged respectively to DirecTV, U-verse or new IP platform AT&T TV, LRG seems to have simply put them all onto DirecTV’s balance sheet. Coupled with Dish Network’s 123,000 lost souls, satellite TV lost 1.029 million customers in the research company’s tally.

Even with the marginalized U-verse platforms losses being counted as nil, LRG tabulated telco sector attrition at 123,000, with Verizon Fios TV shedding a record 84,000 customers.

And in the vMVPD area, even with market leader Hulu + Live TV adding an estimated 100,000 users in Q1, virtual pay TV services still lost customers during the three-month period. This blood loss was led by Dish’s Sling TV, which lost a record high 281,000 users in the quarter. 

LRG’s tally accounts for the top 12 U.S. pay TV companies, representing about 95% of the U.S. customer base. These customers finished Q1 with 83.9 million remaining customers.

“The record net losses were partly related to the impact of the coronavirus, but do not solely reflect consumers’ dropping services. Several providers cited a decrease in connects as a key component of net losses in the quarter, rather than an increase in disconnects,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc.

How bad was it? Pretty, pretty bad.

The U.S. pay TV business lost about 2.065 million customers in the first quarter, its worst quarterly subscriber performance ever, according to Leichtman Research Group (LRG). 

From cable to satellite, from telco to virtual MVPD, every sector of the pay TV industry is in recession.

The top seven cable companies lost about 595,000 video subscribers in the first quarter, compared to a loss of about 335,000 subscribers in Q1 2019. The biggest loser was Comcast, which shed 409,000 linear video customers. 

Since AT&T didn’t break out which of its 897,000 lost linear video souls belonged respectively to DirecTV, U-verse or new IP platform AT&T TV, LRG seems to have simply put them all onto DirecTV’s balance sheet. Coupled with Dish Network’s 123,000 lost souls, satellite TV lost 1.029 million customers in the research company’s tally. 

Even with the marginalized U-verse platforms losses being counted as nil, LRG tabulated telco sector attrition at 123,000, with Verizon Fios TV shedding a record 84,000 customers. 

And in the vMVPD area, even with market leader Hulu + Live TV adding an estimated 100,000 users in Q1, virtual pay TV services still lost customers during the three-month period. This blood loss was led by Dish’s Sling TV, which lost a record high 281,000 users in the quarter. 

LRG’s tally accounts for the top 12 U.S. pay TV companies, representing about 95% of the U.S. customer base. These customers finished Q1 with 83.9 million remaining customers.

 “The record net losses were partly related to the impact of the coronavirus, but do not solely reflect consumers’ dropping services. Several providers cited a decrease in connects as a key component of net losses in the quarter, rather than an increase in disconnects,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc.

The top eight U.S. cable companies added just over 1.23 million high-speed internet customers in the first quarter, led by Charter Communications (582,000 additional customers) and Comcast (up 477,000 users).

For the cable business, it was the best customer performance since Q1 2007.

The data comes from a quarterly report published by Leichtman Research Group (LRG).

Overall, the top cable operators have around 69.2 million broadband subscribers in the U.S., which accounts for about two-thirds of the wireline broadband market.

Cable operators continue to hemorrhage video users—a fact that will be once again driven home Thursday, when LRG publishes its quarterly look at the telecom-based pay TV business.

But the calculus for the cable business has clearly changed, with video now relegated to the role of "loss leader." For instance, Comcast’s top cable TV executive, Dave Watson, told investors this week that the company’s Flex OTT device—which is given out for free to Comcast broadband-only users as an enticement—has now reached 1 million deployments.

Overall, LRG said the top 16 telecom companies controlling 96% of the U.S. wireline internet business added 1.165 million customers in Q1, with “telco” operators like AT&T continuing to shed legacy DSL customers.

It was the best cumulative performance for the wireline broadband industry in five years. 

The top eight U.S. cable companies added just over 1.23 million high-speed internet customers in the first quarter, led by Charter Communications (582,000 additional customers) and Comcast (up 477,000 users).

For the cable business, it was the best customer performance since Q1 2007.

The data comes from a quarterly report published by Leichtman Research Group (LRG). 

Overall, the top cable operators have around 69.2 million broadband subscribers in the U.S., which accounts for about two-thirds of the wireline broadband market. 

Cable operators continue to hemorrhage video users—a fact that will be once again driven home Thursday, when LRG publishes its quarterly look at the telecom-based pay TV business. 

But the calculus for the cable business has clearly changed. For instance, Comcast’s top cable TV executive, Dave Watson, told investors this week that the company’s Flex OTT device—which is given out for free to Comcast broadband-only users as an enticement—has now reached 1 million deployments. 

Video is decidedly a secondary business for cable. And for now, with fixed wireless 5G encroachment on cable’s turf still just a discussion and not a reality, the demise of traditional linear pay TV should not be conflated with a narrative of cable’s business. 

Overall, LRG said the top 16 telecom companies controlling 96% of the U.S. wireline internet business added 1.165 million customers in Q1, with “telco” operators like AT&T continuing to shed legacy DSL customers. 

It was the best cumulative performance for the wireline broadband industry in five years. 

As the product category evolves, and operators get better at the science of live-streaming video over the open internet, users of virtual pay TV platforms are becoming happier with their service.

An online survey of 6,462 U.S. households conducted by Leichtman Research Group found that 76% of respondents are very satisfied with their vMVPD service compared to 69% in 2018.

Visit Next TV to read more stories like this one. 

Only 14% are inclined to switch to another virtual pay TV service in the next six months compared to 27% in 2018, the last time LRG conducted its Internet Delivered Pay-TV Services study.

The vMVPD category includes Hulu Plus Live TV, Sling TV, YouTube TV, AT&T TV Now, fuboTV, Philo and Vidgo.

The 2020 version of LRG’s report suggests the category still isn’t all that accretive to the overall pay TV business. Only 12% of vMVPD subscribers were most recently non-subscribers to any type of pay TV service.

The biggest share of users, 44%, arrived from traditional cable, satellite or telco platforms, while 26% have kept their traditional service and 18% switched from another vMVPD.

Overall, 18% of adults ages 18-44 have a vMVPD service, with that age group accounting for 65% of U.S. vMVPD subscribers.

LRG found that 79% of all households have at least one SVOD or direct-to-consumer streaming video service, and 44% have three or more of these services.

“More than ever, consumers are exploring the trade-offs between traditional and vMVPD pay-TV services—along with an increasing number of streaming options—to find the combination of content and cost that best meets their needs,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc. “Younger adults and those with more people and TVs in the household have thus far proven to be most attracted to the lower-cost and lower-channel vMVPD options.”

As the product category evolves, and operators get better at the science of live-streaming video over the open internet, users of virtual pay TV platforms are becoming happier with their service. 

An online survey of 6,462 U.S. households conducted by Leichtman Research Group found that 76% of respondents are very satisfied with their vMVPD service compared to use 69% in 2018. 

Only 14% are inclined to switch to another virtual pay TV service in the next six months compared to 27% in 2018, the last time LRG conducted its Internet Delivered Pay-TV Services study. 

The vMVPD category includes Hulu Plus Live TV, Sling TV, YouTube TV, AT&T TV Now, fuboTV, Philo and Vidgo. 

The 2020 version of LRG’s report suggests the category still isn’t all that accretive to the overall pay TV business. Only 12% of vMVPD subscribers were most recently non-subscribers to any type of pay-TV service.

The biggest share of users, 44%, arrived from traditional cable, satellite or telco platforms, while 26% have kept their traditional service and 18% switched from another vMVPD. 

Overally, 18% of adults ages 18-44 have a vMVPD service, with that age group accounting for 65% of U.S. vMVPD subscribers.

LRG found that 79% of all households have at least one SVOD or direct-to-consumer streaming video service, and 44% have three or more of these services.

“More than ever, consumers are exploring the trade-offs between traditional and vMVPD pay-TV services—along with an increasing number of streaming options—to find the combination of content and cost that best meets their needs,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc.  “Younger adults and those with more people and TVs in the household have thus far proven to be most attracted to the lower-cost and lower-channel vMVPD options.”

The top U.S. cable operators added more than 3.1 million broadband subscribers in 2019 and now control 67% of the U.S. ISP market, according to Leichtman Research Group.

Led by Comcast and Charter Communications, which both added just over 1.4 million high-speed internet users last year, cable operators haven’t controlled this much of the market since the business of internet service provision by telecommunications companies was a new thing, all the way back in the third quarter of 2001. Comcast had its best broadband growth numbers since 2007.

“The top broadband providers added 28.4 million net broadband subscribers over the past decade, with cable companies accounting for 97% of the net broadband additions in the 2010s,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, in a statement.

That was, of course, just before DSL took hold. The leading U.S. telco’s that foisted that technology lost another 619,605 HSI customers in 2019, LRG said, led by AT&T’s shedding of 312,000 wireline internet customers. Never before has the U.S. telco sector lost so many wireline internet subscribers.

Overall, the top U.S. broadband providers representing about 96% of the wireline internet market acquired about 2.5 million net additional broadband internet subscribers in 2019, compared to a pro forma gain of about 2.5 million users in 2018.

The total U.S. wireline internet market now stands at just over 101.2 million subscribers. 

The top U.S. cable operators added more than 3.1 million broadband subscribers in 2019 and now control 67% of the U.S. ISP market, according to Leichtman Research Group. 

Led by Comcast and Charter Communications, which both added just over 1.4 million high-speed internet users last year, cable operators haven’t controlled this much of the market since the business of internet service provision by telecommunications companies was a relatively new thing, all the way back in the third quarter of 2001. In fact, Comcast had its best broadband growth numbers since 2007. 

“The top broadband providers added 28.4 million net broadband subscribers over the past decade, with cable companies accounting for 97% of the net broadband additions in the 2010s,” “said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, in a statement. 

That was, of course, just before DSL took hold. The leading U.S. telco’s that foisted that technology lost another 619,605 HSI customers in 2019, LRG said, led by AT&T’s shedding of 312,000 wireline internet customers. Never before has the U.S. telco sector lost so many wireline internet subscribers. 

Overall, the top U.S. broadband providers representing about 96% of the wireline internet market acquired about 2.5 million net additional broadband internet subscribers in 2019, compared to a pro forma gain of about 2.5 million users in 2018. 

The total U.S. wireline internet market now stands at just over 101.2 million subscribers.