The good news: Cable still has 100 million subscribers. The bad news: Losing customers has started to become routine. And satellite has just found it can get dumped too.
Just how bad was it?
…this quarter’s losses [52,000 subscribers] were stark for DirecTV, which lost customers for the first time ever, and for Time Warner, who lost customers for the tenth straight quarter and lost more than analysts expected. Comcast’s loss of 169,000 customers was actually an improvement over previous quarters. The losses were chalked up more to the economy rather than “cord-cutters” dropping TV service entirely.
Yes, losing “only” 169,000 customers is considered an improvement. Overall roughly 400,000 households dumped cable.
You got the usual line: blah blah cord-cutting doesn’t exist blah blah once people have jobs we’ll get our subscribers back blah blah. And some were just switching services: Verizon’s FiOS and AT&T U-Verse added 275,000 subscribers. On the other hand, Time Warner Cable found that it somehow had 59,000 more Internet subscribers.
In other words, nothing to see here, we’re still relevant, there are no problems, we are still at war with Eastasia, move along.
image courtesy dmuth on Flickr