Category Archives: Cablevision

Cord Cutting in Q3 2016

I do a piece most quarters after the major cable, satellite, and telecoms operators have reported their TV subscriber numbers, providing an update on what is at this point a very clear cord-cutting trend. Here is this quarter’s update.

As a brief reminder, the correct way to look at cord cutting is to focus on three things:

  • Year on year subscriber growth, to eliminate the cyclical factors in the market
  • A totality of providers of different kinds – i.e. cable, satellite, and telco – not any one or two groups
  • A totality of providers of different sizes, because smaller providers are doing worse than larger ones.

Here, then, on that basis, are this quarter’s numbers. First, here’s the view of year on year pay TV subscriber changes – a reported – for the seventeen players I track:

year-on-year-net-adds-all-public-players

As you can see, there’s a very clear trend here – with one exception in Q4 2015, each quarter’s year on year decline has been worse than the previous one since Q2 2014. That’s over two years now of worsening declines. As I’ve done in previous quarters, I’m also providing a view below of what the trend looks like if you extract my estimate for DISH’s Sling subscribers, which are not classic pay TV subs but are included in its pay TV subscriber reporting:

year-on-year-net-adds-minus-sling

On that basis, the trend is that much worse – hitting around 1.5 million lost subscribers year on year in Q3 2016.

It’s also worth noting that once again these trends differ greatly by type and size of player. The chart below shows net adds by player type:net-adds-by-player-type

The trend here has been apparent for some time – telco subs have taken a complete nosedive since Verizon ceased expanding Fios meaningfully and since AT&T shifted all its focus to DirecTV following the announcement of the merger. Indeed, that shift in focus is extremely transparent when you look at U-verse and DirecTV subs separately:att-directv-subs-growth

The two combined are still negative year on year, but turned a corner three quarters ago and are steadily approaching year on year parity, though not yet growth:

att-combined-subsCable, on the other hand, has been recovering somewhat, likely benefiting from the reduced focus by Verizon and AT&T on the space with their telco offerings. The cable operators I track collectively lost only 81k subscribers year on year, compared with well over a million subscribers annually throughout 2013 and 2014. Once again, that cable line masks differences between the larger and smaller operators, which saw distinct trends:

cable-by-size

The larger cable operators have been faring better, with positive net adds collectively for the last two quarters, while smaller cable operators like Cable ONE, Mediacom, Suddenlink, and WideOpenWest collectively saw declines, which have been fairly consistent for some time now.

The improvement in the satellite line, meanwhile, is entirely due to the much healthier net adds at DirecTV, offset somewhat by DISH’s accelerating declines. Those declines would, of course, be significantly worse if we again stripped out Sling subscriber growth, which is likely at at around 600-700k annually, compared with a loss of a little over 400k subs reported by DISH in total.

A quick word on Nielsen and ESPN

Before I close, just a quick word on the Nielsen-ESPN situation that’s emerged in the last few weeks. Nielsen reported an unusually dramatic drop in subscribers for ESPN in the month of October, ESPN pushed back, Nielsen temporarily pulled the numbers while it completed a double check of the figures, and then announced it was standing by them. The total subscriber loss at ESPN was 621,000, and although this was the one that got all the attention, other major networks like CNN and Fox News lost almost as many.

In the context of the analysis above, 500-600k subs gone in a single month seems vastly disproportionate to the overall trend, which is at around 1-1.5 million per year depending on how you break down the numbers. Additionally, Q4 is traditionally one of the stronger quarters – the players I track combined actually had positive net adds in the last three fourth quarters, and I suspect for every fourth quarter before that too. That’s what makes this loss so unexpected, and why the various networks have pushed back.

However, cord cutting isn’t the only driver of subscriber losses – cord shaving is the other major driver, and that makes for a more feasible explanation here. Several major TV providers now have skinny bundles or basic packages which exclude one or more of the major networks that saw big losses. So some of the losses could have come from subscribers moving to these bundles, or switching from a big traditional package at one operator to a skinnier one elsewhere.

And of course the third possible explanation is a shift from traditional pay TV to one of the new online providers like Sling TV or Sony Vue. Nielsen’s numbers don’t capture these subscribers, and so a bigger than usual shift in that direction would cause a loss in subs for those networks even if they were part of the new packages the subscribers moved to on the digital side. The reality, of course, is that many of these digital packages are also considerably skinnier than those offered by the old school pay TV providers – DirecTV Now, which is due to launch shortly, has 100 channels, compared with 145+ on DirecTV’s base satellite package, for example.

This is the new reality for TV networks – a combination of cord cutting at 1.5 million subscribers per year combined with cord shaving that will eliminate some of their networks from some subscribers’ packages are going to lead to a massive decline in subscribership over the coming years. Significant and accelerating declines in subscribers are also in store for the pay TV providers, unless they participate in the digital alternatives as both DISH and AT&T/DirecTV are already.

Cord Cutting Continues to Accelerate in Q2 2016

One of the data sets I maintain is a database on the major cable, satellite, and telecoms operators in the US and their pay TV, broadband, and voice subscribers. As such, each quarter, I dig through those numbers and churn out a bunch of charts on how those markets are performing, and one of the posts I do each quarter is a cord-cutting update. Here’s the update for Q2 2016.

TL;DR: Cord-Cutting Continues to Accelerate

This is going to be a longish post, in which I’ll dive into lots of the detail around what’s really happening in the US pay TV market. But the headline here is that cord-cutting continues to accelerate, a trend that’s been fairly consistent for quite some time.

Here’s the money chart, which shows the year on year growth or decline in pay TV subscribers across all the publicly traded players I track:

Q2 2016 Cord Cutting 560px All Public Players

As you can see, the trend is very clear, with a consistent pattern from mid 2014 onwards of worse declines each quarter (except Q4 2015), culminating in this a loss of around 834,000 pay TV subscribers at the end of Q2 2016 compared with the end of Q2 2015. As discussed in more detail below, these numbers include the positive growth Dish has seen from its Sling TV product, which has added around 800,000 subscribers over the past year or so. Without those subs, the picture looks even worse.

Read on for more in-depth analysis of these numbers and the trends behind them. Reporters who would like further comment or anyone who would like to know more about our data offerings can reach Jan Dawson at jan (at) jackdawresearch.com or (408) 744-6244.

Avoiding false trends with a proper methodology

I’ve lost track of how many headlines I’ve seen over the last couple of years which posit that cord cutting is somehow slowing down off the back of a small number of providers’ quarterly results. This poor analysis is usually based on several key mistakes:

  • Focusing on quarterly net adds rather than annual changes – this is problematic because the pay TV industry is inherently very cyclical, historically doing much better in the fourth and first quarters of the year, and doing worse in the late spring and summer months, reported as part of Q2 and Q3. You have to compare the same quarter in subsequent years to see the real trends.
  • Focusing on one or two big players, instead of the whole market. One of the key trends that’s emerged in recent quarters is that the larger and smaller players are seeing quite different trends, so fixating on the large players alone is misleading.
  • Focusing on one set of players, such as the cable companies. Though “cable TV” is often used as a synonym for pay TV in the US, it’s not a useful one when it comes to doing this kind of analysis. Cable, satellite, and telecoms players are seeing divergent trends when it comes to pay TV growth, and you have to look at all sets of players to get the full picture.

On that basis, then, I focus on year-on-year change in subs, and try to cast the net as wide as possible when it comes to players. My analysis includes all the major publicly traded cable, satellite, and telecoms (CST) providers in the US, of which there are now 17 in my data set, ranging from AT&T/DirecTV at over 25 million subs to Consolidated Communications, with just 112,000. The only major player now missing from this analysis (following the acquisition of Bright House by Charter) is Cox, which has around four million subscribers. In some of the charts below, you’ll see estimates for Cox included.

Trends by player type

So let’s stark to break down that chart I showed at the beginning, to see what’s happening behind the scenes. First off, here’s a chart that shows the year on year subscriber growth trends by player type: cable, satellite, and telecoms:

Q2 2016 Cord Cutting 560px by player type

This chart illustrates perfectly why focusing on just cable operators is utterly misleading – they’ve actually been having a better time of things over the past two years, but largely at the expense of the major telcos, who have seen plunging growth during the same period.

A tale of two groups of cable companies

It gets even more interesting when you break cable down into two groups, large and small companies:

Q2 2016 Cord Cutting 560px large and small cable

As you can see, what’s really been happening is that the four largest publicly traded cable companies have been doing much better over the last two years, while the smaller ones have if anything been doing worse. A large chunk of that improvement by the large companies comes from Time Warner Cable’s impressive turnaround during 2014 and 2015:

Q2 2016 Cord Cutting 560px cable by company

However, Comcast has also had a meaningful improvement over that same period, moving from 200k net losses year on year to positive net adds in the last two quarters. Legacy Charter has also had a slight improvement, while Cablevision has been largely static.

AT&T and Verizon have shifted focus elsewhere

The rest of the market is dominated by two large satellite companies and two large telcos, but the story here is really about the shift in focus away from TV by the telecoms guys. In AT&T’s case, it’s about a shift towards satellite-delivered TV, while in Verizon’s case it’s about slimming down its wireline operations and shifting focus from TV to broadband.

The transformation at AT&T over the last two years has been dramatic. Since the announcement of its plans to acquire DirecTV in May 2014, AT&T has seen plunging net adds in its U-verse TV business, while post-acquisition net adds at DirecTV have been skyrocketing:

Q2 2016 Cord Cutting 560px ATT DirecTV

This is part of a conscious strategy at AT&T to shift its TV focus to the platform with better economics, in addition to its cross-selling and bundling of DirecTV and AT&T wireless services. The net impact is still a loss of subscribers across its TV business as a whole – around 250k fewer subs at the end of Q2 2016 than Q2 2015 – but the economics of the subscribers it’s keeping are way better than for the subs it’s losing.

Dish is suffering, despite Sling TV

The other major satellite provider, Dish, is seeing worsening rather than improving trends, despite its ownership of over-the-top TV service Sling TV. It reports Sling TV subscribers as part of its overall pay TV numbers, through they’re markedly different in many of their characteristics, but even so it’s seen subscriber losses increase dramatically this quarter. The chart below shows Dish’s reported subscriber losses in blue, and adds estimated Sling TV subscriber growth in dark gray to show what’s really happening to traditional pay TV subs at Dish:

Q2 2016 Cord cutting 560px Dish and Sling

As you can see, the year on year change in traditional pay TV subs at Dish looks a lot worse when you strip out the Sling subscriber growth. The company lost almost a million pay TV subs on this basis over the past year, a number that appears to be rapidly accelerating.

Of course, we’re also including Sling subscribers in our overall industry numbers, so it’s worth looking at how industry growth numbers look when we strip out the same Sling subscribers from the overall pay TV numbers (with the Sling reduction this time shown in red):

Q2 2016 Cord Cutting 560px pay TV plus Sling

As you can see, the picture here worsens quite a bit too, going from a roughly 800k loss to a 1400k loss over the past year. The trend over time is also even more noticeable and dramatic.

Broadband may be the salvation for some

We’ve focused this analysis on pay TV exclusively, but many of these players also provide broadband services, and these services have grown to the point where they now rival the total installed base for pay TV. Indeed, a number of the larger cable operators now have more broadband subscribers than pay TV subscribers. This is another area where the larger cable operators are outperforming their smaller counterparts, as shown in the chart below:

Q2 2016 Cord Cutting 560px broadband and TV

Besides those smaller cable operators, the other company that will fare worst from cord cutting is Dish, which we’ve already discussed. Though it has a few hundred thousand broadband subscribers, it’s not remotely competitive in this space on a national basis, and as TV subscribership continues to fall, it will struggle to make up the difference in other areas, increasing pressure for a merger or acquisition that will allow it to tap into the broadband market. DirecTV, of course, now has the AT&T U-verse and wireless bases to bundle with.

Recent M&A leaves six large groups in control

Lastly, I want to touch on the recent merger and acquisition activity. We’ve already mentioned AT&T and DirecTV, but there have also been two other bits of consolidation: the creation of the new Charter from the combination of Charter, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House; and the acquisition of Cablevision and Suddenlink by French company Altice. It’s interesting to consider the scale of the groups formed by these various mergers in the context of the rest of the industry – these are now the six largest publicly-traded groups in the US pay TV market:

Q2 2016 Cord Cutting 560px Biggest groups

AT&T comes out on top, bolstered enormously by the DirecTV acquisition, while Comcast remains close behind despite not having been involved in the recent mergers (despite its best efforts). The new Charter comes in third, Dish in fourth, and then Verizon and Altice are way behind with a very similar number of subscribers a little under 5 million. After that, in turn, the companies get much smaller, with Frontier next at 1.6 million pay TV subs (including over a million recently acquired from Verizon), with no other publicly traded companies with over a million subs. And of course privately-held Cox is again excluded here, but would come in around the same size as Verizon and Altice.

This is a market increasingly dominated by large players, and that’s a trend that’s likely to continue, with Altice publicly suggesting that it intends to roll up more of the smaller assets. The four largest groups already own 78 million of the roughly 91 million owned by the publicly traded companies we’re tracking here, and the six large groups have 87 million between them. The rest of the market is becoming less and less relevant all the time, and as we’ve already seen has been suffering worse from cord cutting too.

US cable, satellite and telco provider review for Q3 2014

As a counterpoint to the US wireless market trends deck I published last week, today I’m making available a review of some of the major operational metrics and revenue trends for the largest publicly-held cable, satellite and wireline telecoms providers in the US market. This deck focuses on pay TV, broadband and voice telephony services, and shows growth on an annual and quarterly basis as well as total revenues and revenues per user for these services. Some of the key messages are:

  • TV subscribers aren’t shrinking – if looked at annually, to overcome the inherent cyclicality in the market, subscribers are actually growing very slightly
  • Broadband is still growing rapidly, adding several million subscribers each year
  • Voice is shrinking fast, though the rate of decline has slowed recently, as decent cable growth fails to offset the rapid shrinkage among the telcos
  • Pay TV is around a $100 billion a year market, and shows no sign of shrinking despite the shift in viewing habits towards DVR, VoD and online consumption.

I’ve embedded the deck below. You can also see it directly on SlideShare here, where you can find the code to embed it elsewhere or download it as a PDF. As with the wireless trends deck, the data behind these slides is available as a paid service from Jackdaw Research. Please contact me if you are interested in this option.

Analysis of Q1 2014 cable, satellite and telco numbers

I’ve been gathering data on the major US cable, satellite and telecoms providers for the last few weeks, as they’ve been reporting earnings. This post compares their consumer financials – revenues, profits, ARPU, as well as their subscriber growth (shrinkage), and draws conclusions about the state of the market and prospects of individual players. It also provides some analysis of the likely impact of the announced merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable and the rumored merger between AT&T and DirecTV.

A full set of diagrams and charts in addition to analysis is available in this slide deck on SlideShare (which is also embedded below).

Continue reading