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Analyst: Pay TV Will Lose 8.1% of Customers in 2024 and 2025 as Cord Cutting Becomes More Prevalent

David Satin
David covers the biggest news stories, live events, premieres, and informational pieces for The Streamable. Before joining TS, he wrote extensively for Screen Rant and has years of experience writing about the entertainment and streaming industries. He's a Broncos fan, streams on his Toshiba Fire TV, and his favorites include "Andor," "Rings of Power," and "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds."
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David Satin

It’s streaming’s world now, and cable is just living in it. That’s according to Wells Fargo analyst Steven Cahall, who has been tracking the progress of cord-cutting amongst cable and satellite providers, as reported by Next TV. Cahall’s latest forecast has continuing bad news for pay-TV companies, showing that cord-cutting is much more than just a trend.

Cahall’s estimates portend that pay TV will lose 8.1% of its remaining customers in both 2024 and 2025. If those figures are accurate, it will mean cord-cutting is accelerating; pay TV lost 6.2% of its users in 2022, and 7% of its customer base in the second quarter of 2023. Overall, pay-TV penetration now sits at 76.9 million homes, down from its peak of over 100 million in 2015.

Predictably, local affiliate owners like Nexstar and Sinclair Broadcasting Group stand to lose the most from cord-cutting. Both of those companies see more than 50% of their revenues come from domestic affiliates, and Fox is not far behind; 49% of its revenues come from domestic affiliates, making it the most exposed of the major networks.

That could explain why Nexstar is reportedly asking for twice as much in the way of retransmission fees from DIRECTV as it received in its last carriage deal with that provider. With so many users leaving the pay-TV ecosystem, Nexstar has to start collecting more from the viewers it still has.

This is not a problem unique to Nexstar and Sinclair; all of the top cable providers lost viewers in the second quarter of 2023, adding up to 1.73 million losses across the industry. Virtual multichannel video programming distributors (vMVPDs, also known as live TV streaming services) also lost users during the quarter, and only YouTube TV managed to add subscribers.

Streaming hit a new record high of total TV viewing time in July 2023, and cable and broadcast combined fell under 50% of all TV watched for the first time. Analysts like Cahall make it clear that cable’s days are numbered, and the number is shrinking precipitously with every calendar year that passes.

David Satin
David covers the biggest news stories, live events, premieres, and informational pieces for The Streamable. Before joining TS, he wrote extensively for Screen Rant and has years of experience writing about the entertainment and streaming industries. He's a Broncos fan, streams on his Toshiba Fire TV, and his favorites include "Andor," "Rings of Power," and "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds."
Read full bio ›
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