Cable TV has been steadily losing subscribers to streaming services for some time now, and it’s not expected to slow down. Newly revised projections show that 1 in 4 households plan to drop their pay-TV subscription in 2020, and nearly 40% of subscribers will drop service by 2025 That means 14 million U.S. broadband households are expected to drop traditional pay-TV packages.
These numbers come from The Diffusion Group, a syndicated research company. TDG analysts had previously forecasted US households with pay-TV subscriptions to fall in the 83.5 million to 87 million range by 2020, but the actual numbers are lower than that with pay-TV households falling to 81 million at the end of 2019.
And it’s not just cable subscriptions that are falling short of TDG’s projections. Live streaming options like Fubo, Sling, YouTube TV, Philo, and others are also unexpectedly dwindling. It seems like consumers are less concerned with watching TV live as it happens and leaning more toward video-on-demand options.
“Our 2017 forecasts underestimated the growth in cord-cutting and overestimated the uptake of [online TV],” Michael Greeson, president and principal Analyst at TDG, said in a statement. “Beginning in 2007, our 5-year forecasts have been eerily accurate, but it was obvious that 2017 forecasts needed to be tweaked. We were within 5%, but at two years out versus five.”
This revised forecast of 25% of households cutting the cord in 2020 is a huge jump from the numbers in previous years. In 2015, just 16% of broadband customers were likely to drop their subscriptions. Now that number has jumped 56% in 2020 proving that cord-cutting is more popular than ever.