Verizon announced the record addition of 393,000 fixed wireless access customers in the first quarter, with the company continuing to expand its FWA business as its only real rival in the sector, T-Mobile, may have bumped its head a bit on a ceiling of capacity issues. 

Verizon, which ended 2022 with 1.452 million fixed wireless home internet customers, added 379,000 in Q4. (You can read Verizons' full Q1 earnings release here.)

Factoring in 67,000 Fios Internet customer additions (vs. 60,000 in the same period of 2022), Verizon added 437,000 high-speed internet users in the first quarter. 

Verizon also lost 76,000 Fios linear pay TV customers in the first quarter vs. 78,000 year over year, dwindling its base to just 3.16 million remaining subscribers. 

While FWA is a nice little business that's currently carving a bit of wireline broadband market share from cable, Verizon, of course, is actually sized up by equity analysts based on the strength of its wireless business. And based on his report Tuesday morning, Craig Moffett wasn't all that impressed:

"Like AT&T a week ago, Verizon today reported results that speak to this challenging backdrop," Moffett wrote. "Subscriber growth metrics remain weak, with a shocking 478K retail phone subscriber loss across post-paid and pre-paid combined. Promotionality is increasingly weighing on ARPU. Service revenue growth is soft. Profitability is meh. Business wireline is in free fall. Absent the double-edged sword of growing wholesale wireless revenue as cable wireless takes market share, there are no growth stories here."

T-Mobile reports earnings on Thursday, as does Comcast. Charter Communications reports on Friday. 

Virtual pay TV operator fuboTV reported a loss of around 75,000 subscribers in the first quarter, while missing on the consensus forecasts of equity analysts with revenue, bringing in $242 million in sales. 

Analysts had hoped for sales of at least $243 million. 

As fuboTV noted, the revenue figure is a company record and represents a doubling year over year. And the New York-based streaming company's customer ranks, standing at 1.056 million, are 81% larger than they were a year ago. 

But sequential customer growth and analyst revenue forecasts have been the key determiners in this mean season of corporate earnings for streaming companies. And fuboTV saw its already profoundly shriveled stock price shrinking even further in after-hours trading, down 6% and falling within the first hour of filing its Q1 report. 

Also read: NewFronts: FuboTV Offers Custom Audience Segments to Advertisers

The company reported a net loss of $140.8 million in Q1, more than double the $70.2 million it bled in the first three months of 2021. 

FuboTV, which presented a range of new advanced advertising features at the NewFronts this week, generated ad revenue of $22.8 million in the first quarter, an increase of 81% versus Q1 of 2021.

FuboTV recently introduced what was effectively a $5-a-month price increase, wiping out its base tier, but that move didn't come until April. ▪️

Roku reported significantly decelerated revenue growth of only 28% in Q1 to $737.7 million, as well as its first quarterly loss in quite a while, as supply chain issues continue to drag down the No. 1 provider to connected TV OS in America. 

For context, in the first quarter of 2021, Roku reported revenue growth of 79%.

"Platform" sales, which mainly represent advertising revenue, were up 39% year over year to $646.9 million in Q1. Platform revenue grew by 101% during the same period a year ago.

And total time spent by users on the Roku platform reached 20.9 billion hours in Q1, up 14% year over year. For the January - March period of 2021, that uptick was 49%.

Roku active accounts, explosive growth of which in previous quarters spurred corresponding expansions in platform usage and ad revenue, ticked up only by 1.2 million in the first quarter, reaching 61.3 million. 

The active accounts metric missed analysts' consensus forecasts by around 500,000, but the overall revenue figure did surpass equity analysts' predictions. It was maybe because of that -- or maybe driven by the fact that Roku stock simply can't go much lower? -- that Roku shares actually ticked up around 4% in after hours trading Thursday.

Also read: Down Goes Roku Again - Beats Q4 Forecasts with 60.1 Million Active Users, But Misses Badly on Revenue

In its letter to shareholders, Roku touched on some of the same major themes covered by Netflix in its downer Q1 report nine days ago -- that COVID-19 distorted business patterns, and that the ongoing global supply chain crisis is significantly reducing the amount of streaming hardware entering the market, and thus the number of new customers adopting streaming. 

Roku's "player" sales declined 19% year over year, and 46% since Q4, to $86.8 million in the first quarter. Worse for Roku, the OEM partners who ship smart TVs powered by the Roku OS have had to significantly increase their unit prices on a global basis. Less affordable smart TVs around the world means fewer new customers for Roku, Netflix and other streaming companies.  

"As expected, year-over-year Active Account net adds moderated given the end of government stimulus payments that served to temporarily drive discretionary consumer spend in Q1 2021," Roku said in its quarterly investor letter. 

"Additionally, ongoing supply chain disruptions contributed to increased U.S. TV prices in Q1 2022, resulting in industry-wide TV unit sales that were below 2019 (pre-COVID) levels," Roku added. "Our streaming player unit sales remained above 2019 (pre-COVID) levels but were down 12% year-over-year."

Make no mistake, Netflix’s catastrophic Q1 earnings report Tuesday marks an inflection point for the entire video industry.

Netflix shares dropped 36% after the company said subscriber totals fell slightly (200,000 accounts) for the first quarter, and were expected to drop 10 times as much for the second quarter. Those would be the first quarters in a decade where Netflix didn’t see its subscriber rolls. Wall Street was suitably dismayed. 

To ameliorate those declines, Netflix said it’s now planning a cheaper ad-supported tier, as many observers had long urged, and will begin to do something about a whopping100 million password sharers. 

It’s a painful comeuppance for a company notable for its rather smug self-assurance that its unique corporate culture and industry-busting embrace of streaming at massive scale were the right approach for the future of entertainment. Tech giants Amazon and Apple dove into the streaming pool, as did all the major media companies. All wanted a piece of the price premium Wall Street was attaching to streaming ventures with global potential. 

No more though. While Netflix share prices were absolutely battered (remember, the 36% drop comes on top of a similar-sized but slower decline since a mid-November peak of $701). Now shares are trading at around $226 apiece, and it’ll be a long time before those resuscitate. 

“Even if the long-term (Total Addressable Market) is unchanged, the time to get there appears far longer than management anticipated,” wrote LightShed Partners analysts Rich Greenfield, Brandon Ross and Mark Kelley. “Simply put, Netflix felt vulnerable (Tuesday) in a way that it never has before, similar to how we felt about Mark Zuckerberg’s comments on Meta’s last earnings call.”

Netflix is even getting bounced from the FAANG fraternity, the mega-cap tech titans that have been leading the stock market for much of the past half decade. It’s suddenly a new era in streaming. 

“This signals to us that the party is over,” said Karen Firestone, chairman and CEO of Aureus Asset Management. “We are saturated in the United States.” 

By that, Firestone meant that the lucrative U.S. market is nearing maximum adoption; growth for any streaming service going forward likely will come at the expense of someone else, rather than as part of a rapidly growing pie of opportunity. That changes how Wall Street values the entire sector, and how companies evaluate their programming, marketing and financing. 

Not surprisingly, several media companies formerly floating on a bubble of Wall Street goodwill toward streaming heard a loud pop on Wednesday: Disney was down 5.6%, just-launched Warner Bros. Discovery by 6%, Roku 6.2%, and Paramount Global 8.6%. 

Worth watching over the next few days and weeks is how Wall Street treats the competitors as they report their own quarterly earnings and forward strategies. The questions may be more pointed, the interest in international expansion plans and revenue per user metrics more sustained. 

Beyond the broad battle for eyeballs in a North American market that’s looking fully exploited, there are other pressing questions. 

Will companies evolve their ruinous expensive Peak TV spending plans? Will they focus on fewer, bigger swings, hoping to more efficiently grab and sustain the attention of fickle subscribers? 

Does spending $19 billion on content (with no sports or news costs to inflate the totals) still make sense for Netflix? Has the virtuous cycle of spend/make shows/raise prices to make more shows now broken? If so, what’s the company’s new vision? Will it make still more shows, or fewer, better ones that grab fans and keep them coming back?

“The single biggest issue that really was not talked about is that Netflix’s content, especially its English-language content, is simply not resonating relative to the level of spend,” the Lightshed analysts wrote in their note. “With Netflix spending far more than anyone else in the industry at $17 billion dollars annually, including $5 billion on movies, Netflix should be creating significantly more must-see TV series and movies that become ongoing franchises. Reminds us of one of former HBO’s boss Richard Plepler’s favorite lines: ‘More is not better, only better is better.’”

The man now presiding over HBO’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, is reported to already have raised questions about HBO Max program spending. While it’s great to have a culture-defining hit such as Euphoria, Zaslav reportedly mooted, does HBO Max need three shows like that? 

Netflix has built some franchises – Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, Shonda Rhimes’ Bridgerton, the durable Stranger Things – and begun pushing their fans into live experiences, games and other ventures beyond the small screen. 

But lots of observers say Netflix needs more big-name shows, especially because it doesn’t have a decades-old library to back up its new programming. Can it secure the franchises it needs? Some big swings last year whiffed memorably, most notably the $250 million Jupiter’s Legacy, cancelled after a single season.  

It also seems clear that with inflation still jumping up, and more people returning to the workplace, consumer acquiescence to more price hikes is evaporating, especially for discretionary spending like entertainment subscriptions. How do companies structure their spending when they can’t count on price hikes to bail them out down the road? 

Moving into advertising sounds great for Netflix, even if it’s taken more than a decade to get here. But it won’t be a quick nor simple solution to a festering mess in 2022. 

Worse, it might not even solve the underlying problem, wrote Midia Research’s Mark Mulligan, who suggests the entire industry is facing an “attention recession,” as people grapple with more demands on their time in a post-pandemic reopening. 

“The decline illustrates that Netflix does not operate in isolation, and is, instead, but one part of the interconnected attention economy, an economy that is now entering recession,” Mulligan wrote in a blog post Wednesday. 

Attention matters with advertising, where actual viewership for all your shows has to be measured, somehow. For Netflix, getting into advertising will necessitate far more transparency than the notoriously secretive company has ever provided to outsiders, even its creative partners.

Will Netflix finally relent on its refusal to allow OEM TV makers, such as Vizio and Samsung, with ACR data-collection capabilities to finally gather that information on its apps on their interfaces? That would be a big deal for advertisers, program creators and competitors too.  

Netflix’s entry into advertising may also open new opportunities for ratings measurement companies such as iSpot.TV (whose system Comcast/NBCUniversal recently adopted) as they build momentum to succeed Nielsen. Who wins the battle for Netflix may be well positioned for much bigger wins across the streaming industry.  

Observers expect a lot of advertiser interest in that vast Netflix audience, but building a system may take until 2024, Netflix said. 

In the meantime, Netflix faces a delicate balance on a lot of fronts. But it’s not just the Big Red N facing a reconsideration. Wall Street assumptions about the entire sector are now in question; how every major streamer adapts to the new reality will help decide which ones are still thriving, or existing, two years from now.

Netflix Co-CEO Reed Hastings has long resisted the notion that Netflix might deviate from its subscription-only dogma and offer a lower-priced tier that is at least partly subsidized by advanced advertising. 

But coming off its first quarterly subscriber loss since its Qwikster debacle back in 2011, Netflix has suddenly reversed its course on ads. 

"Those that have followed Netflix know that I’ve been against the complexity of advertising and that I'm a big fan of the simplicity of subscription,” Hastings said during his quarterly interview for shareholders. “But as much as I’m a fan of that, I’m a bigger fan of consumer choice. And allowing consumers who would like to have a lower price and are advertising-tolerant get what they want, makes a lot of sense.”

Netflix is aiming to establish its ad-supported strategy over the next year or two, Hastings said. 

Also: Netflix Plan For A Tier With Commercials A Positive Sign for Ad Tech: Analyst 

Hulu has long offered a $6.99 base tier partially supported by ads. 

Rival HBO Max, which prices its full subscription service at $14.99 a month, adopted a partially ad-supported tier last year priced at $9.99 monthly.

Disney is in the process of developing an ad-supported strategy for Disney Plus. And NBCUniversal's Peacock established a free, entirely ad-supported tier at launch two years ago. In fact, that remains the most popular iteration of Peacock. 

“I don’t think we have a lot of doubt that [advertising based streaming] works,” Hastings said. “I’m sure we’ll just get in and figure it out — as opposed to test it and maybe do it or not do it.”

Netflix, which saw its stock price fall over 25% in after-hours trading Tuesday, currently prices its most popular tier in the U.S. and Canada at $15.49 a month after a January price increase. 

In an ominous sign for the broader video business, Netflix watched its stock crater more than 25% in after-hours trading Tuesday afternoon, following the streaming service's disclosure that it lost subscribers in the first quarter. 

Equity analysts' consensus forecasts, and Netflix's own guidance, had suggested narrow global growth of around 2.5 million paid users for the quarter. 

Netflix actually lost around 200,000 subscribers in Q1, finishing March with 221.64 million subscribers globally. And if that weren't enough for Wall Street to swallow, Netflix is forecasting the loss of another 2 million subscribers in Q2. 

You have to get into the Way Back Machine and venture back to 2011 -- all the way to Netflix's "Qwikster" debacle -- to find the last quarter in which the service lost streaming subscribers. 

Revenue also came in underweight, expanding just 9.8% year over year to $7.868 billion. Netflix revenue grew at a 24.2% clip in the first quarter of 2021. 

Netflix predicts that revenue growth will fall to 9.7% in the second quarter.

"Our revenue growth has slowed considerably as our results and forecast below show," Netflix said in its quarterly letter to shareholders. 

"Streaming is winning over linear, as we predicted, and Netflix titles are very popular globally. However, our relatively high household penetration -- when including the large number of households sharing accounts -- combined with competition, is creating revenue growth headwinds. The big COVID boost to streaming obscured the picture until recently," the company added. 

During his quarterly interview for shareholders, Netflix Co-CEO Reed Hastings said the company would break with long-held subscription-only dogma and develop an ad-supported tier over the next few years. 

For now, plenty of Twitter pundits blamed Netflix's sudden growth issues on content. 

However, its highly disappointing quarterly report came despite high levels of consumption for shows including producer Shonda Rhimes limited series Inventing Anna, as well as the second season of her hit romantic period drama Bridgerton, which debuted on March 25. There was also Ryan Reynolds' hit comedy-action movie The Adam Project, which also debuted in March. 

Notably, in the U.S. and Canada, where the biggest chunk of Netflix's subscriber base resides, the company in January instituted its first price increase since October 2020. It ended up losing around 640,000 customers in the U.S. and Canada from January through March.  

Beyond the inflationary pressures impacting all of the global economy, there was also Netflix's decision in March to end service in Russia following that country's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Netflix said it had 1 million subscribers in the region. 

For its part, Netflix management, which had seen its Nasdaq share price halved going into Tuesday from an all-time high of around $690 a share back in October, attributed their growth crisis to three factors:

> Global broadband issues it can't control: "The uptake of connected TVs, the adoption of on-demand entertainment, and data costs" are factors that affect Netflix's ability to get customers signed up all over the world, the company said. Global supply chain issues have hurt sectors like smart TV, which need to proliferate into homes in order for Netflix to keep growing. 

> Account sharing: Netflix said that it has 100 million accounts being shared globally and 30 million in the U.S. and Canada region. "Account sharing as a percentage of our paying membership hasn’t changed much over the years, but, coupled with the first factor, means it’s harder to grow membership in many markets - an issue that was obscured by our COVID growth," Netflix said. 

> Competition: This factor may be the most influential of them all. As Re/code's Peter Kafka put it, "Reed Hastings used to have streaming all to himself. That's over now." It turns out that having the traditional media conglomerates realize their "Albanian Army" mistake and correct it by launching Disney Plus, Peacock, HBO Max, Discovery Plus and Paramount Plus, all within a 16-month window, may be taking a toll on Netflix growth. "Over the last three years, as traditional entertainment companies realized streaming is the future, many new streaming services have also launched," Netflix noted. 

To get back on the growth track, Netflix said it will continue to "double down" on "improvements in story development and creative excellence," an effort the company said that is already evident in its Q1 hits. 

Notably, Netflix CFO Spencer Neumann said Netflix might actually reduce spending on programming in some regions. 

 “We’re pulling back on some of our spend growth across both content and non-content spend,” Neumann said during the pre-recorded interview. “We’re trying to be smart about it and prudent in terms of pulling back on some of that spend growth to reflect the realities of the revenue growth of the business.”

Meanwhile, Netflix will also expand on a test it conducted in Latin America in which it charged a fee to those sharing their accounts with folks not living with them. 

"While we won’t be able to monetize all of it right now, we believe it’s a large short- to mid-term opportunity," Netflix said. 

For fuboTV in the first quarter, almost all the metrics were up. 

Unfortunately, that included operational expenses, which ticked up by 80%. The online video company attributed this increase to the cost of getting into the sports betting business. 

FuboTV ended the first quarter with a $70.2 million loss.

The New York-based streaming company saw overall revenue increase by 135% to $119.2 million in Q1, with advertising revenue growing by 206% year over year to $12.5 million. Average monthly revenue per user increased by 28% to $69.09.

Also Read: fuboTV Launches Branded Content Studio

The subscriber base for fuboTV’s virtual pay TV service was up by 43,000 users in the quarter, with the service ending the first three months of 2021 with over 590,000 customers. 

But operational expenses reached an all-time high of nearly $185 million, as fuboTV ingests online sports betting capabilities into its portfolio. 

Company shares were up over 17% in after-hours trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

At least for another four years, selling ads on linear cable against spinoff iterations of The Walking Dead, a zombie apocalypse series launched 11 years ago, will remain the leading revenue source for AMC Networks. 

In 2025, the media company told its investors Friday during its first-quarter earnings call, OTT revenue from its various subscription video-on-demand platforms will finally surpass affiliate coin, with subscriber ranks swelling as high as 25 million at that time. 

Like a railroad spike to the ol’ cranium, this transition is either good news or bad news, depending on whether you root for the “walking dead” portion of AMC’s business model, creeping along with returns diminishing, right along with the pay TV ecosystem. AMC Networks posted a 6% decline in Q1 revenue to $691.7 million, surpassing analyst consensus forecast but missing its own guidance, due in large part to a 7% decline in advertising coin. 

On the other side of AMC’s narrative are a hearty lot of SVOD survivors—AMC+, Acorn TV, Shudder, Sundance Now and ALLBLK—who carry the potential for a redemptive future. AMC said these platforms are on track to collectively serve 9 million subscribers by the end of 2021. (That is, of course, if the media company hasn't gotten itself gobbled up alive by a larger, acquisitions-hungry conglomerate.)

Streaming revenue was up 14% in the quarter. 

“Streaming is now the most significant growth area across our company,” said CEO Josh Sapan,

In the backdrop is AMC’s original content, which it said is back into full production after pandemic-caused stall-out. 

Long gone are the days when AMC established itself with groundbreaking original shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men and the original The Walking Dead. 

For the first time ever, AMC COO Ed Carroll boasted, AMC will have three Walking Dead (acronym: TWD) shows in production: the original The Walking Dead, which is finally winding down, Fear the Walking Dead and The Walking Dead: The World Beyond.

Roku reported a 79% surge in first quarter revenue to $574.2 million, with sales for the "platform" side of its business more than doubling year over year. 

The streaming company said that the money it makes off its OTT device platform, which is primarily advertising, was up 101% in the quarter, reaching $466.5 million. Gadget sales were up 22% to $107.7 million in Q1.

Roku said its base of "active users" swelled to 53.6 million in the quarter, up 35% year over year. Roku said its users streamed 18.3 billion hours in the first three months of 2021, an increase of 49% year over year.

The increases are in line with guidance. Roku's Nasdaq price, which had cratered to under $280 per share earlier Thursday, as surged nearly 7% in after-hours trading. 

Roku said second-half 2021 profitability to be impacted by the ongoing global chip shortage, which it says is hurting its hardware business. 

Roku said the "entertainment" sector of its ad sales portfolio is the hottest portion of its business right now, with direct-to-consumer streaming platforms spending heavily on Roku platform promotion to grow their respective subscriber bases. 

"The biggest governor of our advertising sales growth is that TV buyers ad buyers tend to prefer linear," Roku CEO Anthony Wood told investors. "There's still a big gap between linear and streaming, but what we saw in the pandemic is that gap started to close.

Roku said Taco Bell found a 5x increase in ROI from a recent campaign on The Roku Channel, thanks to the ability to target viewers and control frequency.

Recalling as an example how difficult it was just a few years ago to convince the erstwhile Time Warner Inc. to promote TV Everywhere app with a digital ad campaign, Wood highlighted what he called a "huge transition" among advertisers, who are moving from a linear to a "streaming first" focus. 

For his part, Scott Rosenberg, general manager of Roku's platform business, said the company has a "unique mix" of scale, data, technology, the number of TVs in the field, and the depth of relationships with programmers, to become the leader in the migration direct ad insertion (DAI).

One analyst noted that the one area of Roku's business that missed forecast was active users. Might the last non-pandemic year, 2019, be a better benchmark for future active user growth guidance? 

Roku CFO Steven Louden agreed. "We'll probably continue to grow nicely, but probably close to pre-COVID levels," he said. 

Sinclair Broadcast Group plans to launch a direct-to-consumer streaming version of the Bally Sports regional sports networks in the first half of 2022. 

“We’ve already cleared the path with the distributors to launch direct-to-consumer,” Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley told investor analysts during the broadcast company’s first-quarter earnings call Wednesday. “We have direct-to-consumer rights for the vast majority of our teams, and we’re in discussions to enhances those rights to make the product even better.”

Ripley didn’t outline specifics of the service, such as price point or launch date. 

He did address some of the complexities--for example, while Major League Baseball lets its individual teams negotiate video rights, the NBA and NHL conduct these talks at the league level. Ripley said Sinclair is in talks with those leagues to enhance its DTC rights following the culmination of the current 2020-2021 pro basketball and hockey seasons. 

Sinclair entered into a joint venture with Byron Allen’s Entertainment Studios, branded Diamond Sports, to buy 19 Fox Sports Networks RSNs from Disney, taking a $4.23 billion write-down last year to complete the purchase. Through a branding deal with casino company Bally’s Corporation, the RSNs were rechristened Bally Sports Regional Networks in March. 

Also Read: One Month Later, Still No Streaming Deal For Sinclair RSNs 

The Bally-branded RSNs ended 2020 with 52 million subscribers. But with the 2021 Major League Baseball season well underway, the channels currently lack MVPD distribution on Dish Network, as well as virtual platforms Hulu + Live TV and YouTube TV. These services collectively accounted for more than 15 million U.S. pay TV homes as of the end of last year. 

“We don’t comment on the specific status of any distributor negotiation,” Ripley said. “Time will tell if any of these distributors return.”

As Sinclair and Diamond Sports grapple with an incomplete pay TV distribution portfolio, the launch of the Bally Sports-branded TV Everywhere app last month has been a success, the company said. 

The TVE app, an important precursor to a DTC launch, merely requires an update of the existing Fox Sports Net app that was already on millions of subscriber phones.  

“It was a big technical feat to convert over from Fox Sports Go,” Ripley said. “Now, it’s about improving and enhancing the features in the app.”

Besides improving Bally Sports’ distribution reach, a DTC app would allow Sinclair to exploit “adjacencies” such as sports betting, Ripley said.

The app, he explained, will eventually become “a platform for interaction and socialization for the fan.” And the TVE app is “a tremendous foundational piece.” 

Overall, Sinclair said its Q1 consolidated revenue dropped 6% year over year to $1.511 billion. 

With the Western world cocooning en masse in March 2020 amid the oncoming COVID-19 pandemic, Netflix was the first major streaming service to report a record subscriber growth quarter, adding 15.8 million customers in Q1.

On Tuesday, it will likely also be first to report what Morgan Stanley analyst Benjamin Swinburne described in a recent shareholder letter as the "ultimate in tough COVID comps,” with Netflix management issuing guidance that it will only report customer additions of around 6 million globally for Q1. 

In the second quarter, it’s predicted that Netflix could lose customers—as many as 3.5 million, according to Swinburne. 

Also Read: Moody’s Upgrades Netflix Credit Rating

The analyst predicts Netflix’s subscriber ranks will start perking back up in the third quarter, growing by 5.8 million, and then by another 9.7 million in the fourth quarter. "We expect net additions to begin increasing year-over-year in the second half of 2021 and in 2022," he wrote.

There could be some surprises. 

For one, analysts believe Netflix’s recent crackdown on account credential sharing could yield some signups. 

Also Read: Netflix Ups the Ante with Latest Deals

"Our monthly proprietary survey of 2,500 U.S. consumers suggests Netflix could add incremental subs by more aggressively deterring password sharing," Cowen analyst John Blackledge wrote in an April 12 report. "We think the roughly 45% of U.S. users who share a password per our survey leaves Netflix well positioned should they choose to aggressively tamp down on password sharing, given the ramp of originals and consistently increasing value proposition of the service. While our survey shows that password sharing has declined from 55% of households in the first quarter of 2016, it still comprises about 45% of Netflix households in the first quarter to date through February."

Comscore reported a narrower loss in the first quarter.

The company also announced a deal with LiveRamp to provide addressable TV and cross platform measurement.

Comscore registered a net loss of $13.2 million, or 19 cents a share, compared to a loss of $27.5 million, or 46 cents a share, a year ago. The current quarter loss includes a $4.7 million impairment charge for property leases.

Related: StackAdapt, Comscore Team Up for CTV Ad Attribution

Revenue fell to $89.5 million from $102.3 million a year ago.

Comscore withdrew its 2020 financial forecast in light of the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

National TV revenue was lower, but local TV revenue was up as it gained new customers in 2019. Comscore’s addressable TV and OTT also increased.

"We entered the year with great momentum, initiating and renewing business partnerships across the media landscape and positioning Comscore for success in 2020 and beyond,” said CEO Bill Livek.

“ While revenue was lower than anticipated, partly due to effects from the pandemic in the final weeks of the quarter, our first quarter results reflect progress in product development and operational improvements. We launched new products and continued to effectively manage expenses, driving strong adjusted EBITDA growth," he said. "While the economic climate has drastically changed in the past few months, we remain confident in our long-term opportunities and strategy . . . given these unprecedented times, we have and will take additional short-term actions to contain expenses and improve our operating cash flow, including temporary reductions in compensation, limited furloughs, and other administrative expense reductions.”

Residential broadband additions at Charter Communications reached 444,000 in the first quarter, far outpacing analysts expectations, while video losses were well below some forecasts, even as the company operated in two of the cities most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Including small and medium business customers, broadband additions reached 464,000. Analysts had expected the company, which operates in New York and Los Angeles among other cities, to add 374,000 high-speed internet subscribers. The broadband numbers did not include about 119,000 customers that have taken advantage of free internet service offered to qualifying homes with K-12 and college students. Including those customers, and the broadband additions rose 583,000.

On a conference call with analysts, Charter chief financial officer Christopher Winfrey said that about half of the homes that took the free Internet offer also ordered an additional product, like voice, video or mobile.

“While some of these customers will no longer subscribe to these services after 60 days, the payment trends of customers that took video and phone is that most of these customers will remain,” Winfrey said.

The strong broadband additions were complemented by lower than expected video customer losses -- 70,000 in the period, or less than half the 170,000 some analysts expected them to lose.

The results helped drive Charter stock as high as $511 (up 3.2% or $15.77 each) per share in early trading Friday. The stock was trading at $503.17 (up $9.94 per share or 1.6%) at 9:48 a.m. May 1.

Related: Q1 Broadband Growth Helps Ease Video Slide for Comcast

In a research note, Evercore ISI media analyst Vijay Jayant said Charters’ results (coupled with Altice USA’s, which has the bulk of its operations in the New York City area) “are clear evidence that even cable companies with high levels of exposure to COVID hotspots continue to perform well, driven by their attractive broadband products.”

Related: COVID-19 Spikes Data Adds, Upgrades for Altice USA

The strong customer results drove a 4.7% increase in revenue to $11.74 billion, and adjusted EBITDA rose 8.4% to $4.4 billion.

"Thanks to the dedication of our employees and the quality of our network, we have continued to deliver high quality connectivity services to millions of existing and new customers in the communities we serve, including homes, businesses, hospital and educational systems, and local, state and federal government institutions. And I am very proud that the products we deliver have played a key role in enabling social distancing, remote working, distance learning, and much more" chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge said in a press release. 

"Our ability to service existing customers with significantly more data, and install new customers at an accelerated rate, is a direct result of the commitment of our employees and the $40 billion of investment we have made in our infrastructure in just the last five years. Charter remains committed to delivering outstanding products and services, keeping the communities we serve connected, working and learning, and doing our part to help our country recover from this crisis. And we continue to invest in the next generation of communications technology and infrastructure that will allow us to service the future of connectivity."

As if there were any lingering doubts, the two largest cable-network groups confirmed what many analysts have been saying for months (and years): Cord-cutting is real, pay TV subscribers are declining at a faster pace than expected and content providers aren’t really sure what to do about it.

21st Century Fox was the last major programmer to release results last week, and they showed that having the most-watched network in the country — perennial ratings winner Fox News Channel — isn’t enough to stop the bleeding.

Fox is losing about 1.5% of its pay TV subscriber base to cord-cutters, cord-nevers and skinny bundles, compared to about 3% for peers such as The Walt Disney Co. and Time Warner Inc.

Overall, pay TV networks had been losing about 2% of their subscriber base in past quarters.

Fox echoed what other big programmers have said in the recent past: the losses could have been worse if not for deals with over-the-top providers like DirecTV Now, Sony PlayStation Vue and Sling TV, which (depending on who you listen to) have either already taken over the pay TV distribution business or are about to.

The reality lies somewhere in between. 21st Century Fox CEO James Murdoch told analysts the impact of over-the-top providers such as DirecTV Now and Sling TV has been small so far, mainly because they have only been in existence for a short period of time. As other OTT services emerge — Hulu Live has just launched and YouTube TV debuted in April — Fox believes they could have a broader impact going forward.

Murdoch was light on details, though, saying it’s still “early days” for OTT carriage and that Fox’s success with new distributors can be tied to continued investment in its brands.

FOX’S HIDDEN EDGE
Not every analyst was convinced Fox had the solution to subscriber declines. In a research note, Sanford Bernstein media analyst Todd Juenger said it was more likely that minimum subscriber clauses in its distribution agreements are propping up Fox’s numbers.

“It’s a head-scratcher how Fox claims to have lost only -1.5% subs from their fully distributed cable networks, about 125 [basis points] better than Disney — unless Fox is benefitting from minimum guarantees that Disney is not,” Juenger wrote. “But minimum guarantees aren’t sustainable without subs.”

In a client note, Morgan Stanley media analyst Ben Swinburne said Fox’s younger-skewing networks such as FX, national sports channels FS1 and FS2 and its regional sports networks, “which have very high carriage minimums,” helped to temper losses.

Juenger said ratings at the Fox networks outside of Fox News are nothing to cheer. Overall, household rating were up 6% in the period but ratings among persons 2-plus rose 5% almost solely on the back of Fox News.

On the analyst call to discuss fiscal third-quarter results, Fox chief financial officer John Nallen said the most interesting aspect of the new OTT providers is that they are finding different segments of the audience to serve.

“So between DirecTV Now and Sling TV, YouTube obviously Hulu, and PlayStation Vue they all very different services and we think this is incredibly important because … many of them are designed to replace traditional MVPDs’ subscriber numbers and losses, but they’re targeting entirely new segments of U.S. households, segments that have broadband now but potentially don’t have traditional MVPDs,” Nallen said, adding that inspires confidence that the services will help stem declines and “will actually grow the universe quite significantly over time.”

At Disney, where the falloff in subscribers was first evident at flagship sports network ESPN in 2015, chairman and CEO Bob Iger also said OTT has helped temper customer losses, emphasizing again that it was still early on that front.

Iger was encouraged by the trend — ESPN plans to launch its own direct-to-consumer offering later this year, using content and rights currently not being exploited on the ESPN linear networks — but stopped short of saying the solution lies in bypassing traditional distributors all together.

RISKY SPENDING ON SPORTS RIGHTS?
On the Disney earnings call, Iger pointed to Disney’s direct- to-consumer offering — which some analysts have said is too narrowly focused to make a meaningful dent in sub losses — and its foresight in identifying the problem two years ago.

BTIG media analyst Rich Greenfield, a frequent critic of Disney and ESPN, said just identifying the problem isn’t enough. Despite the declines, he said, “their seemingly reckless spending on long-term sports rights” does not seem to be in sync with those comments.

Greenfield blogged that Iger’s apparent dismissal of emerging skinny bundles that exclude sports — the Disney chief said launching a new platform without ESPN would be “very challenged” — could be a dangerous move.

Greenfield noted that the fastest-growing package in the largest virtual MVPD (Sling TV with an estimated 1.3 million total customers) is one without live sports. And more are expected to come.

“With ESPN sub losses increasing and without meaningful rate increases, it is not hard to see ESPN’s revenues entering secular decline in the not too distant future,” Greenfield wrote. “On top of accelerating sub losses, it will be hard for ESPN to maintain high-single-digit rate increases as existing distribution deals come up for renewal given the rapidly deteriorating MVPD landscape, unless they enable far greater packaging/tiering flexibility (which we do not see happening).”

Investments in solar power cut into profits at Discovery Communications, whose U.S. networks increased operating income by 6% in the first quarter.

Net income fell 18% to $215 million, or 37 cents a share, from $263 million, or 42 cents a share a year ago, because of the timing if the company’s investment in solar power, and a $34 million debt extinguishment charge, the company said.

Revenue rose 4% to $1.613 billion.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

As cable’s earnings season kicks off this week with Comcast reporting first-quarter results on Wednesday (April 27), analysts think tallies for the typically strong period will see big broadband and video subscriber gains for operators.

Cable operators have turned the corner on basic- video subscriber losses in the past several quarters, with Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable reporting their first basic-video customer gains in nearly a decade last year. In this year’s first quarter — typically a strong season for multichannel-TV subscriptions — the Big Three are expected to show video growth, while all four publicly traded cable operators (including Cablevision Systems) are expected to show gains in broadband customers.

Morgan Stanley media analyst Ben Swinburne said overall pay TV net additions should be down 50%, but that’s mainly due to satellite-TV subscriber losses and declining growth at the telcos. Cable operators, he said in a research note, should see gains via the likes of Comcast, Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable.

‘BIG 3’ GAINS IN SIGHT

Evercore ISI Group media analysts Vijay Jayant and David Joyce also predicted that Comcast, Charter and TWC would post video-subscriber gains, but said the overall pay TV video losses would be more moderate: about 80,000 in the period, compared to a loss of 60,000 in 2015.

Jayant and Joyce in a note said Q1 2015 was the first time pay TV showed a loss of video subscribers in the first quarter, which is typically strong despite being prime rate-increase time. The trend toward overall losses is expected to continue, the analysts said, while cable companies for the most part are expected to show gains.

Swinburne expects Comcast to gain 35,000 video customers while Charter and TWC should add 1,000 and 29,000 respectively.

Cablevision, which has struggled with aggressive discounting by Verizon Communications in its footprint, is expected to shed 23,000 video customers, according to Swinburne.

Jayant and Joyce believe Cablevision will shed about 15,000 video customers in the quarter, followed by gains at Comcast (40,000), Charter (15,000) and TWC (20,000). The analysts see most of the video losses being weathered by smaller operators, with Cable One expected to lose 22,000 video customers in the period, Suddenlink Communications — purchased by Altice in December — down about 10,000 video customers and “other” operators losing a collective 100,000 video customers.

Jayant and Joyce believe Charter will get more aggressive after its $78.7 billion deal to acquire Time Warner Cable is approved, after which he predicts the company will unleash “an arsenal of marketing campaigns.”

Already during Q1, Charter has continued its strategy of targeting satellite-TV subscribers and was giving away a free DVR to new tripleplay subscribers, the analysts said in their report.

On the broadband side, growth is expected to slow because of sluggish telco additions, but cable should continue to exert its dominance in the space.

Overall, Swinburne predicts 775,000 broadband additions, down slightly from last year as AT&T’s U-verse Internet loses 5,000 subscribers and Verizon’s Fios Internet gains 6,000, down from 41,000 in Q1 2015.

Swinburne predicted cable would grab 95% of total broadband additions in the period. Leading the charge will be Comcast (373,000), Charter (123,000), and TWC (227,000).

On the telco side, broadband additions are should continue to slide, with AT&T shedding 5,000 customers, compared to an addition of 94,000 in 2015.

Verizon, which released first-quarter results last Thursday morning, surprised many analysts on the broadband front, reporting 98,000 Fios Internet additions in the period, below the 133,000 additions of last year but still above the 6,000 that Swinburne predicted. Fios TV adds were about even with last year at 36,000, compared to 35,000 in 2015.

On the satellite side, AT&T’s DirecTV unit is expected to report 170,000 net new video subscribers in the quarter, fueled by its parent’s efforts to migrate U-verse TV customers over to the satellite platform. Earlier this month, AT&T debuted a satellite, broadband and wireline phone triple play for $90 per month that could drive additional growth.

CABLE’S BROADBAND HEFT

At Evercore ISI Group, Jayant and Joyce estimated that broadband additions will grow by 1.1 million customers in the first quarter, with cable accounting for more than 1 million of those adds. Telcos, the two analysts estimate, will account for about 50,000 broadband additions.

At Dish Network, which reported its results April 20, net new subscriber losses were 23,000 in the period, but that includes subscriber gains from its Sling TV over-the-top product. Moffett-Nathanson media analyst Craig Moffett estimated that Dish lost about 158,000 legacy satellite TV customers in the period, its worst first quarter ever.

Sling TV, Dish’s over-the-top service, grew by about 135,000 subscribers, though. Sling TV, by Moffett’s reckoning, has about 658,000 video subscribers, in line with estimates. Swinburne estimated legacy satellite losses could be in the 110,000 to 160,000 range.

Despite a strong performance from its cable network group, 21st Century Fox reported lower profits in its fiscal first quarter, with its movie business down and broadcast continuing to struggle.

Net income fell to $675 million, or 34 cents a share, in the quarter ended Sept. 30, from $1.037 billion, or 47 cents a share, in the year-ago period, which included asset sales by its BSkyB unit.

Revenue was down 6% to $6.08 billion because of lower film revenue, foreign exchange rates and the absence of revenue from Shine, which was spun off, the company said.

“Our cable networks business generated strong growth in the first fiscal quarter, delivering double-digit earnings gains both domestically and internationally on sustained increases in overall affiliate fees, higher advertising revenues and lower expenses,” executive chairman Rupert Murdoch said.

Operating income for 21st Century Fox’s cable network programming segment was up 26% to $1.31 billion. Revenue was up 7% on affiliate growth and higher ad revenue as expenses declined. Domestic operating income rose 19%, driven by FS1, FX Networks and Fox News Channel. Domestic affiliate revenue rose 11% because of growth at FS1. Domestic advertising revenue grew 4%, thanks to the sports channels and FNC, the company said.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.