Comcast Lost 12% Of Its Cable TV Customers In The Last Year Alone

Cable executives spent years denying that “cord cutting” (ditching traditional TV) was real. For years they insisted it was a “fiction,” or that it was a fad that would end once Millennials started procreating. Whatever gave them permission to not meaningfully evolve their often predatory, anti-competitive business strategies.

Yeah, about that.

Major cable companies continue to bleed traditional cable TV users at an amazing rate. Last May, the whole industry reported the fewest traditional pay TV subscribers since 1992, as younger audiences flock toward streaming, over the air broadcasts, YouTube, or TikTok.

Last quarter was particularly ugly for Comcast, which lost 520,000 pay TV subs during a single quarter, and 12.6 percent of its video subscribers over the last year. The company now has 14.98 million video customers and dropping, and will soon be replaced by Charter Spectrum (which also lost 241,000 customers that same quarter) as the biggest traditional cable company in the U.S.

It’s now estimated that 8,164 customers are cancelling cable TV every day.

Comcast did manage to add 2 million paid subscribers to its Peacock streaming service (Mrs. Davis is a phenomenal show, by the way) and now has 24 million total. Granted those users pay significantly less money a month than traditional cable TV users. And Peacock has generally been a money loser; it saw $651 million in losses during 2Q 2023, compared to a $467 million loss in Q2, 2022.

Traditionally, Comcast recoups its TV losses on the broadband side, where it holds a monopoly over internet access across much of the United States. But things are shaky there as well, as Comcast is finally seeing some increased competition mostly thanks to fixed 5G wireless networks, and the kind of creative, community-owned broadband networks popping up all over the United States.

Some phone companies have also, thirty years late, started upgrading more DSL users to fiber. As a result, Comcast also lost 19,000 broadband subscribers during the same quarter.

Comcast did manage to add 315,000 wireless customers, but Comcast’s “wireless network” primarily leases access from Verizon, and isn’t going to be anywhere close to the same kind of money maker bloated, expensive cable TV bundles used to be.

This is all rough sledding for a company that successfully lobbied to defang all regulators and competition over a thirty year span (they were a key player in the sleazy smear campaign that derailed Gigi Sohn’s nomination to the FCC), yet now finds itself scrambling for relevance anyway. Add the broader writers’ strike to the mix, and Comcast/NBC’s future looks cloudier still.

And while Comcast will be getting a huge chunk of the more than $45 billion in broadband subsidies included in the infrastructure bill, so will a lot of the municipalities, cooperatives, city-owned utilities, and other locally-owned broadband networks spawned from the monopoly’s apathy.