There were 90.3 million PA (Cable/Satellite) TV subscribers in the United States in 2018, however that number has dropped to 86.5 million this year. In 2020, this number is predicted to fall even lower, to 82.9 million homes.
The number of homes that have cut the cord is expanding at a similar rate. In 2018, 36 million homes did not have access to pay television. This number has continuously risen to 40.2 million in 2019 and is expected to reach 44.3 million by 2020.
It’s crucial to note that just because a family does not have pay television does not indicate they are cord cutters. As more Millennials enter the workforce, they are dubbed “Cord Nevers” because they do not see the value in spending more than $123 a month for cable. A cord cutter is someone who used to pay for television but now avoids it in favor of less expensive and/or more user-friendly alternatives such as streaming or using a DTV antenna.
Are Cord Cutters Missing Anything?
The majority of cord cutters 52 percent claim they don’t miss their former Cable or Satellite TV. Live events (23 percent), local and national news (22 percent), and sports were the most common things they missed (19 percent ).
How many cable subscribers will there be in the United States in 2020?
Cable TV providers have lost millions of consumers as a result of cord-cutting, which they can’t manage to reclaim. In reality, from 2019 to 2021, traditional pay-TV providers lost about 6 million users per year.
Since 2012, major US cable and satellite TV providers have lost 25 million subscribers, with another 25 million expected to leave by 2025. However, most cord-cutters aren’t simply abandoning live TV in favor of all on-demand content. Sling TV, YouTube TV, fuboTV, and Hulu + Live TV are among the most popular all-digital live TV streaming services.
The following are the largest traditional cable TV companies that are losing subscribers:
- In the third quarter of 2021, Comcast has 18.55 million TV customers. The company’s pay-TV customer counts fell below 19 million by the end of 2020. That number was 21.9 million at the end of 2018. In 2017, the corporation had 22.3 million video consumers at the end of the year. Comcast has been losing cable TV customers every year, as we can see.
- Verizon: Since the fourth quarter of 2016, the company’s subscriber counts have been declining. In 2021, the firm lost roughly 281,000 cable television subscribers.
- Charter: Every year, this company loses tens of thousands of video consumers. Higher carriage fees imposed by programmers, according to its CEO, are a major driver of users switching to cord-cutting services. In the fourth quarter of 2021, Charter lost 58,000 pay-TV subscribers. This follows a trend from the previous year, when the firm lost around 66,000 pay-TV subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2020.
- DirecTV (satellite): This AT&T-owned satellite TV provider lost 473,000 subscribers in Q2 2021, down from an 887,000-subscriber drop the previous quarter. Between 2017 and 2019, the corporation lost over 2.3 million satellite TV subscribers. In 2020, the firm lost nearly 3 million DirecTV subscribers, which was a very disastrous year for the corporation.
- Dish Network: In 2021, the second-largest cable TV provider in the United States witnessed a drop in consumer share. In Q4 2021, Dish Network lost 273,000 net pay-TV subscribers, compared to 133,000 in the previous quarter.
For the time being, the bloodletting is set to continue unabated. Even Comcast, which has certainly lost the most cable TV subscribers of all the companies, is pessimistic about its pay-TV prospects. This year, the business forecasts that even more customers will cancel their standard cable TV subscriptions.
However, many Americans continue to use both regular television and cord-cutting services. In 2019, 43% of Americans had both pay-TV and SVOD (streaming video-on-demand) subscriptions.
What is the number of cable subscribers in the United States?
In 2021, almost 4.7 million people elected to cancel their cable or satellite pay-TV services, accounting for 5.8% of the total subscriber base. According to Leichtman Research Group, the top cable or satellite TV providers today have around 76.1 million overall subscribers.
LRG polled providers who account for roughly 93 percent of the overall cable and satellite market. According to the survey, last year’s losses were comparable to the previous year, when providers lost roughly 4.9 million members.
How many people in the United States watch television?
Between 2016 and 2021, the number of USA Network viewers in the United States decreased. For example, in 2019, over 1.23 million individuals watched the show; by 2021, that number had dropped to around 848 thousand.
Is there still a demand for cable?
In 2016, 63 percent of Americans watched TV through a cable subscription, according to a CBS News poll. Since then, the percentage has decreased to less than half of the population, at 45 percent in 2021. During the same time span, streaming increased from 20% to 37%, while digital antennas (still lagging behind) increased from 10% to 12%.
Is cable television losing viewers?
YouTube TV and Philo, two major internet package distributors, aren’t included in Leichtman Research Group’s analysis because they only reveal subscriber figures once in a while. Alphabet, the parent company of YouTube, announced that the service had 3 million subscribers in 2020, and many Wall Street analysts believe it is now well over 4 million. Philo is on his way to a million followers.
In 2021, losses on the cable side escalated. They lost 2.7 million subscribers this year, compared to 1.9 million in 2020.
Direct-to-consumer streaming services, particularly on the programming side, represent a new ray of hope for traditional bundle stakeholders. Broadband service has also constituted a significant new revenue stream for cable companies, particularly since Covid boosted home connectivity demand dramatically. Comcast, the largest cable company in the United States, lost about 1.7 million members in 2021, bringing its total to 18.2 million. Nonetheless, its broadband service has now reached half of the country, and it has established companies like the Flex television bundle on top of that footprint.
How many people have gotten rid of their cable?
Yes, cable television is losing viewers. Cable TV platforms had around 71 million customers in 2020, but that number is likely to drop to 56 million by 2025.
Only 56% of Americans watched cable or satellite TV in 2021, and 27% of families in the United States planned to cancel their subscriptions by the end of the year. In 2015, however, 76% of Americans stated they watched cable or satellite TV, with only 15% saying they planned to discontinue their subscriptions by 2020.
Not only is cable TV losing subscribers, but it is also failing to attract young new subscribers who are breaking away from their parents’ subscriptions.
In the first place, these young individuals choose not to pay for cable or satellite television. 44 percent of adults in the United States have never had a cable or satellite TV subscription, with 61 percent of them being between the ages of 18 and 29.
Every year since 2019, over 5 million people have cut the cord. 4.9 million individuals cancelled their pay-TV subscriptions in 2019, and 5.1 million people did the same in 2020. Another 5.1 million people are expected to cut the cord in 2021, followed by 4.9 million in 2022.
With 797,000 cutting the cord in 2016, 1.5 million in 2017, and 2.9 million in 2018, these numbers have risen dramatically over time.
Even those who don’t cut the cord aren’t necessarily watching exclusively cable and satellite TV material, since 78 percent of U.S. households have a Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu subscription, whether or not they have cable.
Yes, the cable sector is on its way out. The cable sector will likely continue to deteriorate unless executives can devise a new strategy.
The number of cable TV subscribers is predicted to drop from 71 million to 56 million between 2020 and 2025, while the cable and satellite TV penetration rate in the United States is expected to reach 79 percent by 2030. This is down seven percentage points from the 85 percent penetration rate in 2017.
At the same time, income from streaming services is predicted to nearly treble from 2021 to 2025, making the cable business a more difficult competitor to beat.
Yes, streaming services have surpassed cable in popularity. Sixty-six percent of Americans watch cable or satellite television, while 78 percent of households in the United States have Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Disney+ subscriptions.
These two figures aren’t mutually exclusive, but they do suggest that streaming services are more popular than cable or satellite TV subscriptions.
This is especially evident among young individuals aged 18 to 29, with only 34% of this age group having cable or satellite TV subscriptions compared to 81 percent of those aged 65 and older.
What is the largest television network in the United States?
CBS was the most popular ad-supported network in the United States in 2021, with an average of 5.6 million viewers per year. Second and third place went to NBC and ABC, with 5.5 and 4.1 million average viewers, respectively.
What percentage of American homes have a television?
Television is one of the most widely used forms of mass media in the United States. As of August 2013, 96.7 percent of American households owned at least one television set, with roughly 114,200,000 households possessing at least one television set. The vast majority of homes have multiple sets. With 98.4 percent of households having at least one television set, the 199697 season saw the highest percentage of households with at least one television set.
The television networks that broadcast in the United States are the world’s largest and most widely distributed, and shows created expressly for US-based networks are the most frequently syndicated globally. Many critics have claimed that American television entered a modern golden age around the beginning of the twenty-first century, based on a recent surge in the number and popularity of critically acclaimed television series during the 2000s and 2010s to date; whether that golden age has ended or is continuing in the early 2020s is debatable.
What percentage of American families do not have televisions?
Since 2009, the number of houses without a television has more than doubled. According to the USEI study, in 2015, 2.6 percent of American homes lacked a television. This represents a significant increase from the 1.3 percent of American households without a television in 2009.
In fact, the percentage remained constant at 1.3 percent from 1997 to 2009, with the exception of 2001, when it was 1.2 percent.
The massive increase in houses without televisions indicates that TV content creators can’t ignore the fact that viewers are increasingly accessing video through other screens, such as laptops and mobile devices.
The report also reveals that households with televisions are watching fewer of them. The average American household now has 2.3 televisions, down from 2.6 in 2009.
