Even as Public is Locked Down With Little to Do But Watch TV, Cord Cutting "Explodes" and Pay TV Is Hit With Its Worst Losses Ever

Oh no...

Not the media...

LEARN TO CODE.

This article is actually three weeks old, but it's new to me!

Also, it's about general trends which are continuing.

Traditional cable and satellite TV providers posted their most massive quarterly subscriber losses in the first three months of 2020, as the COVID-19 tornado started to hit the U.S. economy in March. What's more, internet-delivered "virtual" TV providers registered a net loss in the period, too.

Oh no, TV took a hit on the internet too?

Oh no!

And the cord-cutting bleeding is only going to get worse in Q2, as the economic fallout from the coronavirus takes a deeper bite, analysts predict.

The combination of high prices -- amid the backdrop of record unemployment -- as well as loss of live sports fueled an overall drop of 1.8 million pay-TV subscribers in Q1, per estimates by Wall Street analyst firm MoffettNathanson. That translates into an annual rate of decline of 7.6%, the fastest shrinkage of the sector on record.

"At 63% of occupied households, traditional pay TV penetration has reached a level not previously seen since roughly 1995," analyst Craig Moffett wrote in a research note Friday. "There are now as many non-subscribing households (46M) as there were pay TV subscribers in 1988."

The Hollywood Reporter wrote about this yesterday, stressing that the Great Turn Off will accelerate, not diminish.

The rise in unemployment due to the novel coronavirus pandemic led to a new record in pay TV subscriber losses in the first quarter of 2020, and one pay TV analyst on Thursday predicted cord-cutting would accelerate further.

"We see cord-cutting as a secular trend that likely will kick into high gear during and on the other side of COVID-19," Wells Fargo's Jennifer Fritzsche wrote in a report. "With this belief in mind, we have moved our estimates for residential video subscriber losses lower across our cable coverage" to be "worse than Street for 2020 and 2021."

For example, she still projects Comcast to lose nearly 1.79 million pay TV subscribers in 2020, followed by 1.37 million in 2021, up from her previous estimate for a loss of 1.00 million users.

Comcast is a major cable provider and parent company of NBC Propaganda Operations.

The analyst says her "stress tests" modeling accelerating cord-cutting do not "spell doomsday" for the financial health of the media and cable providers.

But... all of her scenarios are bad, and the worst ones are "really bad."

Learn to code, bitches. Learn to fucking code.

Oh that's right, you're too stupid to code.

Learn to dumpster-hunt, bitches. Learn to fucking dumpster-hunt.

posted by Ace at 05:05 PM

| Access Comments