Right now is likely a bad time to be a cable or satellite TV owner. We have known for some time cord cutting was picking up speed and now it seems that it is really gaining momentum.
Now according to Kagan traditional pay-TV has lost 941,000+ subscribers in the second quarter 2017, making the total losses for pay TV just shy of 2 million at 1.8 million losses for cable and satellite companies.
What makes these numbers even scarier is they include gains by streaming services such as Sling TV and DIRECTV NOW. Combined these services have about 2.5 million subscribers. Without these two services the pay-TV loss numbers would have been far worse.
Traditional pay-TV providers still have a large subscriber base at about 96.1 million total subscribers as of the second quarter 2017. (Not including live TV streaming services.) While that may sound like great news it is down from their peak of 112 million in 2012.
The question now is how quickly will the traditional pay-TV model fall part. Are we 5, 10, or 20 years away from it becoming unsustainable? The only thing we can do is wait and see what happens.
Source: MultiChannel
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