The second quarter is usually something of a lament for pay TV subscription reports, and the latest “informitv Multiscreen Index” has 10 of the leading U.S. pay TV services shedding 663,000 subscribers between them in Q2 2016. However, during this generally weak season for TV subscriptions, some operators managed to reduce their customer losses, according to informativ. The 10 services in the index lost 437,100 TV customers in 12 months, which was less than 0.5% of their combined subscriber base.
“Mergers and acquisitions have reshaped the top 10 pay TV services in the United States,” William Cooper, the editor of the informitv Multiscreen Index, says. “Our index shows how new players rank and tracks the overall subscriber trends.”
AT&T is the largest pay TV operator in the Multiscreen Index, with 37.82 million TV customers (25.3 million in the United States). Its satellite subsidiary DirecTV gained 342,000 TV customers in the United States, while its U-verse TV service lost 391,000.
Comcast is the largest single service, reducing its TV customer loss for the quarter to 4,000, ending the period with 22.40 million TV subscribers.
Charter’s merger with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks brought it to a total of 16.93 million TV subscribers and a quarterly loss of 152,000.
The index also shows that Verizon Fios TV subscribers declined by 1,226,000, following the transfer of some markets to Frontier, which gained 1,085,000 and entered the top 10, although organic losses were 112,000.
Optimum and Suddenlink (which are both now owned by Altice) lost 2,000 and 23,000 respectively.
“DirecTV was the only company in the top 10 to report organic subscriber growth, although that was largely at the expense of AT&T U-verse,” informitv analyst Sue Farrell adds. “It’s been a turbulent quarter with some large losses but the real story is one of consolidation.”
