U.S. pay-TV subscriber levels posted their first increase since 2017 during the third quarter, according to a new report from Wall Street research firm Moffett Nathanson.
Overall subscriptions to cable, satellite and streaming packages increased 303,000 from the prior quarter, the firm’s ongoing Cord-Cutting Monitor found. The overall rate of decline came in at 5.8% in the period, the third straight quarter of improvement in that key metric. The report doesn’t size the total market, but a range of industry estimates put it at between 65 million and 70 million, well below the peak of just north of 100 million in 2012.
NFL and college football typically drive an annual surge in pay-TV sign-ups, the report’s author, Craig Moffett, acknowledged. Nevertheless, “there are genuine green shoots here,” he asserted in the report. “The rate of decline for traditional distributors improved for the fifth straight quarter. While the rate of decline is still scary-high, it is unmistakably moderating. At Comcast, the trend has been improving for eight straight quarters; there, the rate of decline was the ‘slowest’ – although no one would actually call it ‘slow’ – since 2022. Even DirecTV and EchoStar have shown at least a little improvement.”
The notion of pay-TV establishing a bottom has broad implications for a range of media companies, especially on the programming front. Exposure to linear cable has driven Comcast’s decision to spin off most of its networks into Versant. Warner Bros. Discovery, which in the midst of an intense M&A battle, intends to spin off or sell its linear networks. A+E Global Media is looking at its strategic options, including possibly a sale.
Charter, the No. 1 pay-TV operator in the U.S., drove the positive trend with its strategy to bundle streaming subscriptions from Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal and other programmers into leading-tier TV and broadband plans.
“Those deals have turned out to be game changers, and not only because they made the worth proposition for Charter (Spectrum) subscribers so much better,” Moffett wrote. “Equally important is the fact that those deals made Charter believe in video again. Since Charter renewed its commitment to video, Charter’s quarterly subscriber losses have been cut by two thirds. It was the improvement at Charter that made it possible for the growth at vMVPDs to put the whole industry into positive territory.”
Comcast, today the No. 2 pay-TV operator, shed 257,000 during the quarter and its overall subscriber base fell 10.3% from the same period in 2024.
YouTube TV added about 750,000 subscribers in the quarter, Moffett estimates, a lower tally than in prior third quarters. The downturn, he reasoned, was likely due to a cost hike that took effect earlier this year.
The stats do not reflect YouTube’s dispute with Disney, which saw it offer customers a $20 rebate. Industry sources have pegged YouTube TV’s at 10 million subscribers. Corporate parent Google has not disclosed a subscriber number in nearly two years. Moffett said he has “lower confidence” in his YouTube TV estimates than for the overall marketplace, and said “it could well be” that the company added more than 750,000 subscribers in the period.
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