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Cable TV’s collapse deepens: ‘It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no longer any floor’

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Peter Kafka, Chief Correspondent covering media and technologySep 3, 2024, 11:10 AM EDTShareSave

The NFL season, which is about to kick off, should bring the pay-TV industry more subscribers. But not enough to slow a yearslong decline. Dustin Bradford/Getty Images

Good news for the pay-TV industry, which suffered its worst quarter ever at the beginning of the year: The next three months were not quite as bad.

Pay-TV distributors — that’s conventional cable guys like Comcast, satellite-TV outfits like DirecTV, and digital alternatives like YouTube TV — lost 1.6 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2024, according to analysts at MoffettNathanson.

That’s very bad! But not as bad as other Q2s, like in 2023, when the industry lost 1.7 million subscribers, or in 2022, when it lost 1.8 million subs.

And in other good news for the TV industry … well, that’s about it.

Those 1.6 million subscribers lost in the second quarter account for 6.9% of the industry’s base, and there’s no reason to think the slide is going to slow down at all, MoffettNathanson’s Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson write: “It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no longer any floor.”

As we’ve discussed here before, a few years ago there was a thought that digital pay-TV distributors like YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV would replace losses at conventional distributors, but that’s no longer true.

And those digital distributors are increasingly seeing “seasonality” in their business — consumers sign up for them in the fall to watch the NFL, and leave at the beginning of the year. That’s why YouTube TV lost subscribers for the first time in the first quarter, and added only 50,000 subscribers in the second. The service added 300,000 subscribers in the same quarter last year.

And speaking of sports, Moffett and Nathanson spend a lot of time talking about Venu, the sports streamer that was supposed to have launched last month but has been held up indefinitely by a federal judge.

The companies behind Venu — Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, and Fox — have been arguing that their bundle of channels was going to appeal to people who didn’t pay for cable TV. But it seems very likely that many of their customers would be existing cable-TV subscribers trading down from a more expensive package of channels to Venu’s “skinny” package. Which means that even if Venu eventually launches, it won’t help the cable-TV industry stem its losses.

But Moffett and Nathanson now doubt the Venu owners are going to end up fighting the lawsuit that has tabled their launch. That’s because, like my colleague James Faris, they think the suit could end up blowing up the industry’s long-standing practice of “bundling” channels — which means that a cable-TV distributor that wants to sell Disney’s ESPN also has to sell Disney-owned channels like Disney or ABC in the same package.

And if that happened, things would totally collapse for the industry.

A Venu rep declined to comment. Last week, ESPN’s boss, Jimmy Pitaro, defended the Venu package to a group of reporters and pledged that his company would keep fighting its suit. But that will be true only up until the day it isn’t.

Correction: September 4, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misidentified one of the companies behind Venu. Warner Bros. Discovery, not Comcast, is involved in Venu.