The cable industry has been in a nose-dive for years. Comcast’s Q1 2024 earnings report showed its cable business losing 487,000 subscribers. The cable giant ended 2022 with 16,142,000 subscribers; in January, it had 13,600,000.
Charter, the only US cable company bigger than Comcast, is rapidly losing pay-TV subscribers, too. In its Q1 2024 earnings report, Charter reported losing 405,000 subscribers, including business accounts. It ended 2022 with 15,147,000 subscribers; at the end of March, it had 13,717,000.
And, like Comcast, Charter is looking to streaming bundles to keep its pay-TV business alive and to compete with the likes of YouTube TV and Hulu With Live TV.
It’s a curious time as cable TV providers scramble to be part of an industry created in reaction to business practices that many customers viewed as anti-consumer. Meanwhile, the streaming industry is adopting some of these same practices, like commercials and incessant price hikes, to establish profitability. And some smaller streaming players say it’s nearly impossible to compete as the streaming industry’s top players are taking form and, in some cases, collaborating.
But after decades of discouraging many subscribers with few alternatives, it will be hard for former or current cable customers to view firms like Comcast and Charter as trustworthy competitive streaming providers.
Cable companies have seen the writing one the wall with Cable TV for quite awhile. They had the perfect product to pivot to with broadband. Had they offered a great product with great customer service, they’d have had the market forever especially how much consumers felt burned by telecoms abusing their market dominance with with early broadband.
Instead, cable companies doubled down on the lock-in and bundle model with deceptive pricing and horrible customer service ceding ground to wireless providers and even the same telecoms that were hated before.
Our household cut the cord on cableTV/satellite about 14 years ago, but kept cable modem service since then. Now that the local telecom has laid fiber at 500Mb/s for $49/month we dropped any relationship with the cable company. Two months before the fiber came in, cable suddenly dropped the price of our 100Mb/s service and increased the speed to $300Mb/s. At $80/month it was still better for us to ditch the cable company and go with the telecom fiber connection.