If you ever wondered what keeps cable executives up at night, it is likely the fact that over 11,000 Americans are canceling traditionally pay TV every single day. At this rate, over the next year, more than 4 million Americans will cancel their cable or satellite service.
This all comes as numerous earnings reports show a flood of cord cutting. When looking at traditional pay-TV losses, DISH lost 367,000, DIRECTV lost 346,00, Comcast lost 106,000, Spectrum lost 66,000, and Altice lost 28,000 subscribers. (The numbers are likely even higher as many smaller cable companies have not announced their losses.)
What we are seeing is most of these people are not picking services like Sling TV or DIRECTV NOW. Although almost a million people canceled cable TV in just 3 months less than 100,000 of them replaced it with Sling TV or DIRECTV NOW.
Yet at the same time many subscribe to on-demand services like Netflix or Hulu. Yet knowing exactly where these cord cutters are going is tough right now. YouTube TV and other services are not releasing subscriber numbers, but reports are that their growth is not fully replacing the losses seen by traditional pay TV.
So, what is happening here? It seems most Americans have decided that when they cancel cable they don’t need a live TV streaming service to replace it. This very well could be the nightmare situation many cable executives have feared. As many had hoped, services like Sling TV and DIRECTV NOW would gain subscribers at a similar rate that cable TV was losing them.
When you cut the cord did you replace it with a live TV service or did you stick to on-demand and free options? Leave us a comment and let us know.
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