The “cord cutting” trend cable execs spent a decade claiming was a fad just broke another round of new records. According to Leichtman Research, major cable TV providers lost another 1.7 million subscribers last quarter, as users flock to streaming, over the air TV, TikTok, or, you know, books. Roughly 17,700 customers cut the cord every single day during the second quarter of 2023.
Over the last year (Q2 ’22 to Q2 ’23) the traditional cable TV sector lost a whopping 5,360,000 customers, compared to 4,235,000 customer defections the year earlier. The current number of U.S. households that has a cable connection sits somewhere around 46 percent, down from 73% at the end of 2017.
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Historically, a big cable company like Comcast or Charter wasn’t too hurt by “cord cutting” because it could just jack up the cost of monopolized broadband access. And while that’s still generally true; here too cable giants are seeing increased competition from community broadband (co-ops, utilities, municipalities), 5G home wireless, and phone companies belatedly upgrading to fiber.
Interestingly though, streaming TV providers also wound up losing subscribers, albeit at a much slower rate:
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Recently my wife and I were talking about which streaming services we should stop paying for and we realized it’s been about 15 years since we “cut the cord.” I remembered because we decided to stop paying for Hulu (among others) and were talking about how when we first discontinued cable we wouldn’t have been able to do so without Hulu.
I just cut off our Hulu with the recent price hike and we also started out with Hulu. We share a family plan for Disney+ and sail the high seas for anything else. Having an OTA antenna with an HD Home run is also a plus.