No one is going to confuse the U.S. linear pay TV business as a growth sector. But for those who base their careers on, say, knowing just how much rope is left in traditional programming networks, it’s good to see the trend lines.
And in the third quarter, public pay TV companies that still disclose their customer comings and goings largely reported improved YoY results, including the two biggest operators: Charter Communications and Comcast.
Notably, Comcast, which lost nearly half a million pay TV customers in the third quarter of 2023 and saw its rate of video attrition accelerate to 12.6%, slowed its erosion to 11.5% from July through September of this year.
For its part, Charter, the now the largest U.S. pay TV operator by a hair’s length, saw its attrition rate accelerate from 6% - 9.5% YoY, largely due to larger losses earlier this year (393,000 in Q2, for example). But it’s Q3 results this year were still better than those of 2023.
The three larger virtual MVPDs we have visibility on — Hulu + Live TV, Sling TV and Fubo — all once again added subscribers in the third quarter. The three-month period that includes the start of the college football and NFL seasons is usually a big signup period for live-streamed services that can be added and cancelled by customers immediately.
Our sampling lacks some key constituents, including YouTube TV, which touted more than 8 million subscribers back in February but doesn’t regularly have its customer data broken out during earnings reports by parent company Alphabet.
DirecTV insiders have recently disclosed that their combined pay platforms — DirecTV satellite, DirecTV Stream and U-verse — have around 11 million remaining customers. But the operator’s numbers have been shielded from public view ever since AT&T spun the company off in late-summer 2021 in a deal with private equity company TPG.