Citing the largest year-over-year pay-TV subscriber slide
yet that occurred in the first quarter of the year, Craig Moffett of Moffet
Research declares: “Pay TV is unmistakably declining and the rate of
penetration decline is accelerating. The very fact that there have recently
been more new households being minted each year than there have been new pay-TV
households is proof positive that cord cutting is real.”
While making abundantly clear that this cord-cutting
evidence didn’t mean “seismic changes” were just around the corner for the industry,
Variety reports Moffett projects that the pay-TV penetration rate would sink
from %87.9 this year to 82% by 2020. He characterized the cost-cutting
population as being 1.9 million strong–though that’s a drop in the bucket
against a pay-TV populace totaling over 100 million in the U.S.
Moffett sees a combination of two factors driving the
acceleration of subscriber decline: 1) the lower-income households that he
believes comprises the biggest part of the cord-cutting segment are getting
priced out of the market by increasing subscription rates 2) the digital
alternatives from Netflix to Hulu that are meant to be supplements to the
pay-TV market end up being substitutes in the aggregate.
No comments:
Post a Comment