Recently several large pay-TV companies had high hopes that their live TV streaming services would offset the growth of cord cutting. These cheaper services target cord cutters with packages ranging from $25 a month to $65 a month, depending on the service. Now, the research group MoffettNathanson reports that 60% of new cord cutters are skipping these live TV streaming services in favor of on-demand only options like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon according to an Adweek report.
“There were a lot of expectations and predictions that [live TV streaming services] were going to have a hockey stick adoption rate that really just did not transpire,” said Brian Fuhrer, SVP of product leadership at Nielsen. “You would think that people would have adopted it really quickly, but it’s been a little bit slower than people anticipated.”
With an estimated 35 to 40 million Cord Cutters in the United States right now, there are just about 7.7 million subscribers to live TV streaming services according to Comscore. This works out to be about 6.1% of Nielsen-paneled households in November of 2019.
The news is not bad for pay-TV companies. Recently DISH was able to post a TV subscriber gain as for the first time, its live TV streaming service Sling TV grew faster than DISH’s satellite TV service lost subscribers.
This shift to on-demand only TV likely explains why Disney launched Disney+ and AT&T’s launch of HBO Max. The question now is how far will content companies go to reach customers who have no interest in live TV streaming services.
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