Category Archives: Verizon

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.

The US Wireless Market in Q3 2016

One of the markets I follow most closely is the US wireless market. Every quarter, I collect dozens of metrics for the five largest operators, churn out well over a hundred charts, and provide analysis and insight to my clients on this topic. Today, I’m going to share just a few highlights from my US wireless deck, which is available on a standalone basis or as part of the Jackdaw Research Quarterly Decks Service, along with some additional analysis. If you’d like more information about any of this, please visit the Jackdaw Research website or contact me directly.

Postpaid phones – little growth, with T-Mobile gobbling up most of it

The mainstay of the US wireless industry has always been postpaid phones, and it continues to account for over half the connections and far more than half the revenues and profits. But at this stage, there’s relatively little growth left in the market – the four main carriers added fewer than two million new postpaid phone customers in the past year, a rate that has been slowing fairly steadily:

postpaid-phone-net-adds-for-big-4This was always inevitable as phone penetration began to reach saturation, and as the portion of the US population with good credit became particularly saturated. But that reality means that future growth either can’t come from postpaid phones, or has to come through market share gains almost exclusively.

In that context, then, T-Mobile has very successfully pursued the latter strategy, winning a disproportionate share of phone customers from its major competitors over the last several years. The chart below shows postpaid phone net adds by carrier:postpaid-phone-net-adds-by-carrier

As you can see, T-Mobile is way out in front for every quarter but Q2 2014, when AT&T preemptively moved many of its customers onto new cheaper pricing plans. AT&T has been negative for much of the last two years at this point, while Sprint has finally returned to growth during the same period, and Verizon has seen lower adds than historically. What’s striking is that T-Mobile and Sprint have achieved their relatively strong performances in quite different ways. Whereas Sprint’s improved performance over the past two years has been almost entirely about reducing churn – holding onto its existing customers better – T-Mobile has combined reduced churn with dramatically better customer acquisition.

The carriers don’t report postpaid phone gross adds directly, but we can derive total postpaid gross adds from net adds and churn, and I find the chart below particularly striking:
gross-adds-as-percent-of-base

What that chart shows is that T-Mobile is adding far more new customers in proportion to its existing base than any of the other carriers. Sprint is somewhat close, but AT&T and Verizon are far behind. But the chart also shows that this source of growth for T-Mobile has slowed down in recent quarters, likely as a direct effect of the slowing growth in the market overall. And that slowing gross adds number has translated into lower postpaid phone net adds over the past couple of years too:

t-mobile-postpaid-phone-net-adds-by-quarter

That’s a bit of an unconventional chart, but is shows T-Mobile’s postpaid phone net adds on an annual basis, so you can see how each year’s numbers compare to previous years’. As you can see, for most of 2015 and 2016, these net adds were down year on year. The exceptions were again around Q2 2014, and then the quarter that’s just ended – Q3 2016, when T-Mobile pipped its Q3 2015 number ever so slightly. The reason? Likely the launch of T-Mobile One, which I wrote about previously. The big question is whether T-Mobile will return to the declining pattern we saw previously when the short-term effects of the launch of T-Mobile One wear off.

Smartphone sales – slowing on postpaid, holding up in prepaid

All of this naturally has a knock-on effect on sales of smartphones, along with the adoption of the new installment plans and leasing, which are breaking the traditional two-year upgrade cycle. The number of new smartphones in the postpaid base has been slowing dramatically over the last couple of years too:

year-on-year-growth-in-postpaid-smartphone-base

But the other thing that’s been happening is that upgrade rates have been slowing down significantly too. From a carrier reporting perspective, the number that matters here is the percentage of postpaid devices being upgraded in the quarter. This number has declined quite a bit in the last couple of years too, across all the carriers, as shown in the cluster of charts below:

postpaid-device-upgrade-rate-for-all-4-carriers

The net result of this is fewer smartphones being sold, and the number of postpaid smartphones sold has fallen year on year for each of the last four quarters. Interestingly, the prepaid sales rate is holding up a little better, likely because smartphone penetration is lower in the prepaid market. There were also signs in Q3 that the new iPhones might be driving a slightly stronger upgrade cycle than last year, which could be good for iPhone sales in Q4 if that trend holds up through the first full quarter of sales.

What’s interesting is that the upgrade rates are very different between carriers, and T-Mobile in particular captures far more than its fair share of total sales, while AT&T captures far less than it ought to. The chart below compares the share of the smartphone base across the four major carriers with the share of smartphone sales:

smartphone-base-versus-sales

As you can see, T-Mobile’s share of sales is far higher than its share of the base, while AT&T’s (and to a lesser extent Verizon’s) is far lower.

Growth beyond phones

So, if postpaid phone growth is slowing, growth has to come from somewhere else, and that’s very much been the case. Tablets had been an important source of growth for some of the carriers for a few years, but their aggressive pursuit has begun to cost them dearly now, at least in the case of Sprint and Verizon. Both carriers had promotions on low-cost tablets two years ago and are now finding that buyers don’t feel the need to keep the relationship going now their contracts are up. Both are seeing substantial tablet churn as a result, and overall tablet net adds are down by a huge amount over the past year:

tablet-net-adds

There may be some recovery in tablet growth as Verizon and Sprint work their way through their churn issues, but I suspect this slowing growth is also reflective of broader industry trends for tablets, which appear to be stalling. Still in postpaid, there’s been a little growth in the “other” category, too, but that’s mostly wireless-based home phone services, and it’s not going to drive much growth overall. So, the industry likely needs to look beyond traditional postpaid services entirely.

Prepaid isn’t growing much faster

The next big category for the major operators is prepaid, which has gone through an interesting evolution over the last few years. It began as the option for people who couldn’t qualify for postpaid service because of poor credit scores, and was very much the red-headed stepchild of the US wireless industry, in contrast to many other markets where it came to dominate. But there was a period a few years back where it began to attract customers who could have bought postpaid services but preferred the flexibility of prepaid, especially when prepaid began to achieve feature parity with postpaid. However, that ebbed again as installment plans took off on the postpaid side and made those services more flexible. Now, we’re going through yet another change as a couple of the big carriers use their prepaid brands as fighter brands, going after their competitors’ postpaid customers. The result is that those two carriers are seeing very healthy growth in prepaid, while the other operators are struggling.  In the chart below, I’ve added in TracFone, which is the largest prepaid operator in the US, but not a carrier (it uses the other operators’ networks on a wholesale basis):

prepaid-net-adds

As you can see, AT&T (mostly through its Cricket brand) and T-Mobile (mostly through its MetroPCS brand) have risen to the top, even as Sprint has gone rapidly downhill and Verizon and TracFone have mostly bounced around roughly at or below zero. There is some growth here, but it’s all being captured by the two operators, while the others are treading water or slowly going under.

Connected devices – the fastest-growing category

The fastest-growing category in the US wireless market today is what are called connected devices. For the uninitiated, that probably requires something of an explanation, since you might think of all wireless connections as being connected devices. The best way to think about the connected devices category is that these are connections sold for non-traditional things, so not phones and mostly not tablets either, but rather connected cars, smart water meters, fleet tracking, and all kinds of other connections which are more about objects than people. The one exception is the wireless connections that get bundled into some Amazon Kindle devices as part of the single upfront purchase, where the monthly bill goes to Amazon and not the customer.

This category has been growing faster than all the others – the chart below shows net adds for the four major categories we’ve discussed so far across the five largest operators, and you can see that connected devices are well out in front over the past year or so:comparison-of-net-adds

Growth in this category, in turn, is dominated by two operators – AT&T and Sprint, as shown in the chart below (note that Verizon doesn’t report net adds in this category publicly):connected-devices-net-adds

At AT&T, many of these net adds are in the connected car space, where it has signed many of the major car manufacturers as customers. The rest of AT&T’s and most of Sprint’s are a mix of enterprise and industrial applications, along with the Kindle business at AT&T. T-Mobile also has a much smaller presence here, and Verizon has a legacy business as the provider of GM’s OnStar services as well as a newer IoT-focused practice.

Though the connection growth here is healthier than the other segments, the revenue per user is much lower, in some cases only single digit dollars a month. However, this part of the market is likely to continue to grow very rapidly in the coming years even as growth in the core postpaid and prepaid markets evaporates, so it’s an important place for the major carriers to invest for future growth.

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.

Why Netflix is Wrong to Throttle AT&T and Verizon Customers

Today, it emerged that Netflix has been throttling video streams for those customers which are using the AT&T and Verizon Wireless networks (but not T-Mobile and Sprint customers) to stream its content. From what we know so far, the carriers were unaware of this, and are understandably upset. Netflix’s justification for this partial throttling, according to a Wall Street Journal article, was that “historically those two companies [T-Mobile and Sprint] have had more consumer-friendly policies.” And the overly-simplistic value judgement implied by that quote gets at the heart of why this is wrong.

There are several issues here. Firstly, this treatment is discriminatory but not discriminating – what I mean by that is that the Netflix policy discriminates between networks but treats all users on each network the same, regardless of what data plan they’re actually on. For example, as of December 2015, 11% of AT&T’s smartphone customers are still on unlimited plans. Since December, AT&T has begun selling unlimited plans again to certain customers who take DirecTV and AT&T service. As such, over 1 in 10 AT&T customers have unlimited plans, and that number is growing, but Netflix’s policy takes no account of this. The same applies to Verizon customers. By definition, Netflix doesn’t know which plans users are on. Perhaps I’m one of those unlimited customers at Verizon, or I have a 30GB plan from AT&T, but I’m treated the same as if I’m on a 1GB plan regardless. At the same time, not all Sprint or T-Mobile customers are on unlimited plans either.

Netflix hasn’t been transparent here until it was called out, either with customers or with the carriers. That’s problematic for two reasons – users who aren’t aware have no control either, and Netflix should have given users a choice. The other problem is that users will have assumed degraded video was the fault of poor network performance, which negatively impacts perceptions of the carrier rather than Netflix itself when video is throttled.

Netflix’s justification in a hurriedly put out but opaque blog post is that customers don’t mind, but it has no way of knowing how users really feel, because they haven’t been aware. To be sure, some users are very concerned about data caps, and would choose overages. Simply giving users a choice would have solved the problem without the underhanded approach Netflix has taken. It’s uncharacteristic for a company that’s been so bullish about transparency and fair treatment (and been a huge proponent of net neutrality). Netflix’s current approach has many of the same shortcomings as the original implementation of T-Mobile’s BingeOn plan, which also throttled video without users’ permission. Deliberately degrading video performance without user knowledge or consent is wrong, no matter who does it.

That WSJ quote at the beginning sums up what’s really going on here – except that what Netflix really means is that some carriers have been less friendly to over-the-top video providers by metering bandwidth their customers use. This Netflix policy has very little to do with better serving customers and everything to do with better serving Netflix by getting people to watch more of its videos. If it really wanted to serve customers better, it would make this policy explicit, transparent, and opt-in.

Why Verizon’s AOL deal makes sense

Note: I’ve added an addendum at the bottom of this post about the content angle specifically.

Verizon buying AOL isn’t a complete surprise – there were rumors of a deal back in January, but now they’ve been confirmed. But it also makes good strategic sense for Verizon as part of a broader strategy that’s been emerging for some time now.

Verizon’s traditional business

Verizon, of course, has its roots in a very different business – landline and wireless telecommunications services. Those make up the vast majority of its revenues today, and its landline business has been going through an interesting transition recently (as I outlined in an earlier post), and in the landline business this means shifting the base from old copper lines to fiber. To be clear, there’s growth left in this business, but it’s highly dependent on the combined value proposition of broadband and pay TV.

A shift in TV viewing requires a hedging strategy

However, the writing is increasingly on the wall for traditional pay TV – disruption is coming, and this quarter marked the first time in recent memory that the major pay TV providers actually saw a decline year on year in TV subscribers:Screenshot 2015-05-11 12.31.47

Verizon recognizes this, and in a previous post I wrote a little about Verizon’s response to this threat to the pay TV business. That response takes the form of a hedging strategy, which allows it to take advantage of the video business even if the traditional pay TV side begins to suffer. I outlined in that post a three-part strategy here (quoting now from that earlier piece):

  • Sell classic pay-TV services to as many of the 15 million households where FiOS is available as possible. It’s only sold about a third of those so far, and the number is creeping up pretty slowly, so though there’s growth left, it’s not going to be huge. Competition from cable and satellite remains fierce, so there’s incremental growth here at best. Verizon will continue to evolve the offering here to make more and more content available on more and more screens, but this will be largely a competitive differentiator rather than a source of significant revenue growth.
  • Sell a range of wholesale content delivery and related services to third-party content providers like HBO. This is unbounded by the FiOS footprint or even Verizon’s overall broadband footprint, so it could grow significantly from where it is today, though it will always be a much smaller market than consumer video services.
  • Sell over-the-top video services to consumers independently of the FiOS offering. This is exemplified by Redbox Instant today, but could well expand into something more. Verizon already has great relationships with all the major content providers through FiOS, and through broader licensing agreements could easily create a sort of unbundled FiOS TV offering to be sold nationwide.

Where AOL fits

AOL fits firmly in the third pillar of this strategy, but also broadens it in several ways:

  • It takes the over-the-top content strategy beyond video into news and other forms of content, including Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and so on (it remains to be seen how AOL’s news-focused employees respond to the acquisition, especially given the strong negative reaction to Verizon’s own “news” site a few months back)
  • It takes Verizon beyond subscription content and heavily into the advertising sphere, which both provides a more varied set of revenue streams around content but also offers opportunities to provide converged advertising campaigns, retargeting and other attractive elements of a multi-screen advertising platform. It’ll take time to build these linkages, but in time they could be quite powerful for advertisers (see the Cablevision ESPN deal this reported this week).
  • It takes these content services beyond the Verizon brand – though Verizon has a national brand, it’s not associated directly with quality content, and though it owns FiOS and therefore a video service, it’s not national. It also doesn’t have a position yet in shorter-form video content. AOL extends it into some of these new areas, and using a different brand that may be more familiar to some potential customers.

The AOL brand

Now, the AOL brand is in some people’s minds forever going to be associated with yesterday’s technologies (my wife’s first reaction to hearing about the deal this morning was “what does AOL do anymore? I just think of “You’ve Got Mail”). But the reality is that AOL remains one of the top online brands in the US in particular, and one of only a handful of companies that reaches over half the US online population with its content each month. AOL, both through its own brand and through powerful sub-brands such as Huffington Post and TechCrunch, is a much more powerful content player than Verizon on a national and especially international basis than Verizon. Yes, there’s some baggage that comes with that, but for the most part the AOL brand family is a great boost for Verizon.

Risks and uncertainties

Despite the strategic sense behind the deal, there are of course risks and uncertainties. There will undoubtedly be a strong culture clash between the two companies – Verizon’s an enormously conservative company in many ways, and although there are pockets of startup mentality, it’s far from the norm across the company. And it’s an absolutely enormous company, much closer in size to AOL Time Warner in its heyday than AOL today. It will be easy for AOL and its culture to be lost or squashed in the course of the acquisition. And although there are lots of synergies (including those described above) on paper, the devil is in the details and it will take a lot of work to identify how these pieces really come together in practice to provide value for the combined company, its customers, its advertisers, and its shareholders. However, on balance I think it’s a good thing that Verizon is willing to take risks as it seeks to navigate uncertain waters in the TV and video space, and this is certainly a much bigger bet than its peer AT&T’s joint venture with Chernin around Otter Media. That, of course, could end up being brilliant or very costly.

Addendum: not just an ad tech play

I’m seeing a lot of people assuming that this deal is entirely about advertising and/or ad tech, and that the content side is either incidental or will be sold off down the line somewhere. However, I’m not as convinced about that, or that the content business at AOL looks the same under Verizon ownership as it did on a standalone basis. Here’s why:

  • Verizon is building up to the launch of an over-the-top mobile first subscription video service in the summer. Huffington Post content in particular seems like a great fit in such a service (it may well have been one of the content partners even without an acquisition). With over a hundred million of its own wireless subscribers to market such a service to, Verizon has a great new shopfront for some of the AOL content
  • Verizon also provides FiOS within its landline footprint, and some of AOL’s video content could be a great fit there too, as part of traditional bundles, as part of Custom TV (should it survive legal challenges), or in some other form.
  • Verizon’s insight into its own users and the 70% of Internet traffic that traverses its network at some point could also allow it to add a very important targeting layer to AOL’s advertising around its own content – the challenge for all online advertisers is how to extend their reach beyond the sites they own – Verizon provides a significant depth of insight about users AOL could never glean itself. This goes the other way too – Verizon can gain insight about users from the time they spend on AOL’s content, even if  they can’t monetize that usage directly.

In short, I think AOL’s content businesses have a better shot and a better role under Verizon than they did at AOL, and I’m not convinced they’re just going to be spun off once the merger closes.

ESPN shows Verizon it wasn’t bluffing

When Verizon announced it would be launching Custom TV, its semi-a-la-carte FiOS offering, and news first broke that some of its content partners didn’t like it, I tweeted this:

My theory here was that Verizon clearly knew its contracts forbade such a move, but that it was banking on such strong consumer support for the idea that any content owner who publicly opposed it would immediately be seen as anti-consumer. I characterized that attitude as naive, but everything Verizon has said and done since then seems to bear out the theory. Firstly, Verizon went ahead and launched the service anyway over the following weekend, and in its marketing materials it clearly played up the pro-consumer angle:

Verizon Gives Customers an Unrivaled Level of Choice With the New FiOS ‘Custom TV’…

FiOS Custom TV is designed to give customers more freedom and flexibility to choose the perfect TV plan for their home…

FiOS Custom TV delivers consumers more choice and control over their TV…

On Verizon’s earnings call this past week, the company reiterated this approach, in response to a question from an analyst:

Look, this is a product that the consumer wants. It’s all about consumer choice. I mean, if you look at the TV bundles today, most people only on average watch 17 channels. So, this is a way to give consumers what they want on a choice basis. And we believe that we are allowed to offer these packages under our existing contracts.

Note that Verizon isn’t formally relying on the pro-consumer strategy – it still claims that it believes its contracts allow this unbundling of channels. But it’s very clear that it intends to lean heavily on the pro-consumer angle in its public communications, if not in court.

Now, of course, ESPN is suing Verizon over Custom TV, which is a pretty significant step when it comes to disputes between pay TV providers and content owners, which never usually get this far. ESPN (and its owner, Disney, referenced in my original tweet) clearly isn’t intimidated by Verizon’s strategy. It’s hard to see this as anything other than ESPN calling Verizon’s bluff in the strongest possible terms.

Things could still go one of two ways here:

  • Verizon ultimately prevails in court and gets to keep its Custom TV offering. This outcome would be groundbreaking for the industry as a whole, and not just for Verizon – it would potentially open the door for more experimentation by pay TV providers along similar lines.
  • Verizon loses in court and is forced to withdraw the service, including canceling service for whichever customers have taken up the option. This would be embarrassing, to say the least.

However, the problem with the whole approach is that it sets Verizon at odds with the content owners, and especially the most powerful, Disney, in a far greater way than any simple carriage dispute does. Verizon has set itself up in opposition to the content owners on this question, not just in a matter of dollars and cents, but on the whole central question of how content gets packaged and delivered to customers. Even if Verizon wins the case (which seems like a stretch), it seems likely to damage Verizon’s relationships with these critical partners in the TV business irreparably, which could well have nasty longer-term effects too.

Thoughts on Verizon’s Q1 2015 earnings

Verizon reported results this morning. In listening to the call and reviewing some of my numbers, I was struck my the fact that Verizon is in the midst of several important transitions. I’ll highlight three here today:

  • Converting the phone base to smartphones
  • Converting the phone base to installment billing
  • Converting broadband subs to FiOS

Each of these three transitions is largely about moving a portion of Verizon’s base from one thing to another, rather than about growth per se, but each has a financial impact, and two of the three are accompanied by new growth opportunities.

Converting the phone base to smartphones

The first transition is converting the phone base to smartphones, and specifically to 4G LTE smartphones. Here’s what that process looks like at Verizon Wireless:

Converting base to smartphonesAs you can see, the total number of phones isn’t really growing much (in fact, Verizon lost phone customers in Q1). But smartphones within the base, and especially 4G smartphones, are growing very rapidly. The financial impact here is that smartphone owners, and 4G smartphone owners in particular, consume lots more data. In a world where almost every plan includes unlimited text and voice, the path to growth from these customers is increasing data usage, and getting them on a 4G smartphone is the best way to do that. This growth opportunity will last for another couple of years at least – there are still 11 million 3G smartphones and 17 million basic phones in the base to convert. But at some point it will come to an end. Continue reading

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.

Q3 2014 US Wireless Trends Deck

Last week, FierceWireless published my brief analysis of some key trends in the US wireless market in Q3 2014, along with exclusive early access to the slide deck I do each quarter. As of this morning, the deck is now available on Slideshare for viewing, embedding and downloading (as a PDF). I’ve embedded it below for easy access, but feel free to share it and download it as you see fit.


The data behind the deck is available in Excel or Numbers format as a paid product from Jackdaw Research, on either a one-off basis or an annual subscription. Please contact me if you are interested in either of these options. I hope you find these useful. Equivalent decks for the past two quarters may be found (along with some other decks) on my Slideshare page.

Analysis of Q2 2014 US wireless market

Last quarter, I provided an overview of trends among the major US wireless providers in Q1 2014, and I’m repeating that analysis here for Q2 2014. A short preview including some analysis has been available on FierceWireless for the past week. I’m now providing additional analysis (below) and a detailed set of slides on Slideshare (also embedded below). Last quarter’s analysis is here, and a recent post on Sprint and T-Mobile, which provides further analysis is here.


This analysis covers five providers: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Tracfone and Verizon Wireless. Four of these are the largest carriers in the US market, and Tracfone is the fifth-largest provider, though not a carrier but an MVNO. There are other MVNOs in the US market, but none of them comes close to Tracfone in scale, and that’s why it’s included in this analysis. It’s also the largest prepaid provider in the US by some margin. These five providers between them make up the vast majority of the US market, especially since the acquisitions of Leap Wireless and MetroPCS in the last couple of years by AT&T and T-Mobile.

A tale of two markets

In many ways, the US wireless market is in fact still two separate markets, with AT&T and Verizon in one half, and the other players operating in the other. This is evident in total subscribers and revenues, margins, churn rates and other metrics, with AT&T and Verizon either larger or performing significantly better than the rest of the players. Here, for example, is a chart showing total subscribers for the five players:Total wireless subscribersAnd here is a chart showing EBITDA margins:

Wireless EBITDA marginsThese carriers’ relative scale and profitability are related, as I’ve discussed previously, and most recently in last week’s post on Sprint and T-Mobile. This is perhaps the most important fact to understand about the US market, and one that isn’t likely to change anytime soon, as the gulf between the two largest players is far too great for any of the smaller players to bridge in the near future, at least organically. Continue reading