Still Got Cable? Pay TV Providers See Subscriber Exodus in 2021
A new report on cord-cutting trends may have pay-TV executives thinking “at least we’re not selling Russian vodka.” Leichtman Research Group’s recap of 2021 subscription totals among the top pay-TV providers—including traditional cable, satellite, fiber-optic services, and streaming apps—shows that almost 4.69 million people dropped pay-TV accounts last year.
You may find it easier to think of that number as a bit more than the entire population of Louisiana.
Leichtman’s figures look even worse compared to the 2021 broadband subscription totals that it released Monday. Where cable and fiber providers combined to net another 2.95 million subscribers (with cable gaining almost all of them), the top seven cable operators covered by Leichtman lost nearly 2.7 million video subs on their own.
Comcast led that parade, with 1.67 million subscribers dumping its Xfinity pay-TV service, followed by Charter (367,000 Spectrum TV subscribers gone), Cox (down 260,000), and Altice (241,000 gone). Leichtman draws most of these usually approximated figures from earnings reports but computes its own estimates for privately-held firms like Cox.
The cord-cutting calamity was even worse under the “Other Traditional Services” heading, which encompasses satellite as well as fiber providers: 2.89 million canceled subscriptions.
DirecTV suffered the most from this strain of cancel culture, losing 1.9 million subscribers, after which its fellow satellite operator Dish had 595,000 subscriptions fall out of orbit. Verizon and Frontier’s fiber services filled out that balance with 388,000 losses between the two of them.
Only streaming-TV services gained customers. FuboTV did best among them, gaining almost 582,000 subscribers for its sports-centric
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