“Over the past year, cable companies have added about 3.5 million broadband subscribers, while telcos have had net losses of about 500,000 broadband subscribers”, the group’s president, Bruce Leichtman, said in the press release. Previously, the companies lost 545,000 subscribers in Q2 2015, 300,000 in Q2 2014, and 350,000 in Q2 2013.
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The top telecom providers lost about 500,000 video subscribers in 2Q 2016, compared to a gain of about 10,000 subscribers in 2Q 2015.
Satellite TV providers taken as a group performed strongly, adding 61,000 subscribers – including gains from the Sling TV OTT service – compared with prior-year losses of 214,000.
The 14 largest US cable and telephone providers added about 190,000 net high-speed internet subscribers in Q2 2016, according to numbers just released by Leichtman Research Group.
With AT&T moving subscribers over from U-verse and marketing DirecTV aggressively, the satellite platform had its biggest growth quarter since the first quarter of 2009, adding 342,000 customers.
Interestingly, the picture was not quite as bleak for the top six cable companies as it was for the group overall; their losses actually decreased compared to Q2 2015, dropping from 340,000 lost subscribers to 225,000.
There was also bad news for telecom operators on the broadband front, according to Leichtman.
Cable operators continued to pile on broadband subs while telcos continued to lose them in the second quarter of 2016.
“The past seven second quarters account for the seven fewest quarterly broadband net adds over past fifteen years”, LRG notes in a statement.
In the most comprehensive assessment yet of second quarter subscriber metrics, Leichtman Research said the pay-TV industry lost 665,000 subscribers.
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The top 11 companies do have a subscriber based of 93.75 million, so 705,000 subscribers is a relatively small percentage, but the fact that losses have increased overall is notable.
