Research Details Continued Cord Cutting

Cord cutting is continuing to levy sizable pressure on the sports media industry in the United States, reports sportsbusiness.com citing new data is showing more subscriber hemorrhaging by cable, satellite, and telco television providers.

The latest Cord-Cutting Monitor report by MoffettNathanson LLC, a New York-based research firm, showed that those traditional multichannel providers combined to serve 72.57 million US subscribers in the second quarter of 2021, a total down by 1.35 million subscribers from the prior quarter, and down by 7.7 per cent on a year-over-year basis.

While that quarterly loss improved somewhat from the 1.57 million subscribers lost in the second quarter of 2020 during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the long-term trends remains deeply troubling for the industry.  

Cable, satellite, and telco operators have now been a seven-year run of subscriber losses. And the industry has lost nearly 6 million subscribers in the last year, and nearly 13 million since 2019.

Overall, the losses have amounted to nearly 28 million households since the industry peak of 2014, a drop of more than a quarter of the entire overall base.

As sports continues to hold an outsized role in the American television industry, drawing many of the largest audiences of all programming regardless of genre, it has not been enough to stop the subscriber bleeding.

And while the beginning of the 2021 National Football League season produced a promising start from a ratings standpoint, last season’s viewership challenges for that entity only exacerbate the long-term concern around television subscriber loss.