Is pay-TV bottoming out, or even preparing for a rebound?
Is pay-TV bottoming out, or even preparing for a rebound?
The steady and rapid declines in pay-TV viewership in recent years has been well-documented. In 2023 alone, traditional cable and satellite companies lost 7 million customers, and DISH Network’s parent company EchoStar is currently considering bankruptcy. But new data from MoffettNathanson might have a tiny silver lining for pay-TV companies: the free-fall of subscriber departures could be subsiding. If so, it’s possible that pay-TV has a future after all, and could even be preparing to bounce back a bit.
Key Details:
- Back to the past: Pay-TV subscribership has fallen to 1987 levels, but the decline is leveling off.
- Sports and news to the rescue?: Cable, satellite, and live TV streaming plans aggregate top sports and news programming in one place.
- Streaming partnerships: Continued partnerships between streaming services and pay-TV companies could help ensure cable has some kind of future.
As reported by Deadline, a new report from equity research firm MoffettNathanson found that pay-TV subscribership has fallen to levels not seen since 1987, when the overall population in the United States was smaller by 97.8 million people. That year was at a time when the cable industry was still ascending. At its peak, it is estimated that nearly 90% of American homes had a pay-TV subscription in the early 2000s, however, that number is currently down to just 34.4%. Subscriber declines are still at a level of almost 12% per year, but the good news is that in three straight quarters, the decline rate for traditional pay-TV services has improved.
That could be an indication that cable and satellite subscriber losses are leveling off. It’s the first time since the 2010s that the rate of decline in pay-TV subscribers has improved for three quarters in a row, but that hasn’t stopped major media companies like Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery from spinning off their faltering cable channels into separate entities in order to focus their growth efforts on their TV and movie studios and streaming services.
The customers who leave traditional pay-TV aren’t exactly flocking to live TV streaming services either. The biggest of these streamers is YouTube TV, which announced in early 2024 that it had reached 8 million subscribers. But MoffettNathanson estimates that YouTube TV lost half a million customers in the first quarter of 2025, showing that even the best in the live TV streaming business isn’t immune to customer defections.
So is pay-TV ready for a rebound? There’s no legitimate chance that it bounces back to its heyday in the 1990s and 2000s, but cable and satellite companies are still capable of pulling in big profits at current subscriber levels. And there are still a couple of compelling reasons that cable and satellite could continue to attract viewers in the years ahead.
For one thing, pay-TV plans are still the only place to watch live sports whose rights are owned by different companies. Think about it; without a pay-TV plan, you’d have to have subscriptions to Paramount+, Peacock, Prime Video, the forthcoming streaming services from ESPN and Fox, plus Netflix just to watch the NFL — or you can subscribe to a DIRECTV plan that carries most of these games all on the same service, and in some cases, includes platforms that have streaming exclusives as part of the subscription. The same goes for live news, as cablers are the only way to access news from different sources, all with the same single subscription.
Are sports and news enough to ensure that pay-TV continues to survive? They could well be. A 2024 survey from Hub Research showed that almost 60% of sports fans say that figuring out how to watch the sports they want has gotten more confusing, and 69% said it was a hassle to have to use more than one service to watch games. The hunger for live sports isn’t going away any time soon among American audiences, and pay-TV plans are inarguably the best way to watch a variety of sports on a single platform.
There’s another factor that could help pay-TV companies continue to survive: the embracing of streaming services, instead of fighting them. That trend started in 2023 when Charter Communications fought tooth and nail to get Disney to agree to give all customers of select Spectrum TV plans free access to Disney+ and Hulu as part of their cable package. Now, Spectrum customers get access to a wide variety of streamers with their plan, getting around $80 per month in savings as compared to what they’d pay to sign up for these services individually.
DIRECTV has hopped on this train, too. Its new MyEntertainment Genre Pack has Disney+, Hulu, and Max, which, even with the existing bundle of those streamers, would cost $17 per month or more by itself. MyEntertainment subscribers get those streamers at no additional cost, along with 40+ popular cable entertainment networks for a total of $35 per month. DIRECTV also sells other smaller packages focused on sports and news, as well as Spanish-language channels, so that viewers feel less like they’re stuck paying for channels they don’t want, a common complaint from cord-cutters.
A study from Hub published in May showed that 70% of customers found a service that lets viewers manage all their subscriptions in one place was somewhat or very appealing. If more pay-TV providers are able to make distribution deals with streaming services, audiences could begin to see the value in keeping their channel packages instead of ditching them to try to stack streaming services.
Thanks to the rising costs of on-demand streaming, stacking five or six services is just as expensive as a cable plan these days. Viewers aren’t seeing the advantage to losing their pay-TV plans anymore, and that could mean that cable and satellite have a future, despite the popularity of streaming services.
DIRECTV
DIRECTV is one of The Streamable’s top choices for the best live TV streaming service overall in 2026, especially for users who want the most channels or want to watch the most live sports. With an unbeatable lineup of local, news, sports, and entertainment channels, three main signature packages, an unlimited DVR, and 20 simultaneous streams at home, DIRECTV remains a premier choice for any cord-cutter.