About 14% of adult broadband subscribers don’t take a traditional pay-TV service, up from 9% in 2011, The Diffusion Group found in a new report, Pay-TV Refugees, 2014, which includes a look at what's driving the cord-cutting trend and the potential appeal of new and emerging direct-to-consumer streaming video services.
"Today, residential broadband services are used in 75% of US households, meaning 13 million broadband households are currently doing without a traditional pay-TV service," Michael Greeson, TDG president and author of the new report, said in a statement.
While this is an obvious concern for incumbent pay-TV providers, the trend provides “an excellent opportunity for new video purveyors, whether pure-play online ventures like Netflix or the growing list of television networks going direct-to-consumer,” he said.
TDG, like others that analyze the telecom market, predicts that the number of home broadband subscriptions will surpass the number of home pay-TV subscriptions for the first time in the coming months. In fact, Leichtman Research Group found that it’s already the case when factoring in the subscriber bases of the top U.S. cable operators and telcos.
Update: TDG based each study on surveys of more than 2,000 adult broadband users.
