Television viewers continued to cut the cord in droves during the latest quarter as the value proposition of traditional TV dwindled further.
Some 1.71 million pay-TV subscribers in the U.S. ditched their services in the second quarter, compared with 2 million in the first quarter, according to Wells Fargo analyst Steven Cahall. While declines in the most recent quarter were smaller on an absolute basis, they accelerated on a percentage basis, with subscribers falling 7% from a year before, compared with a 6.8% drop in the first quarter.
“The drivers are clear: more content on streaming, higher costs of the pay TV bundle, fragmentation of engagement on screens of all sizes,” Cahall wrote in a note to clients earlier this week.
Cahall looked at both linear services and virtual multichannel video programming distributors (vMVPDs) like Sling and YouTube TV that let people watch TV networks without traditional cable, and found that 1.72 million people parted ways with linear services, while a net of just 8,000 piled into vMVPDs, making for the lowest quarter in his history of tracking that metric.
A number of current trends in the media industry could affect future cord-cutting patterns. Streaming services have been raising prices, “so we’ll see if that changes cord cutting,” Cahall said. In the meantime, Hollywood strikes would seem to “favor streamers to linear as streamers often have longer content pipelines.”
Opinion: Disney continues to ruin streaming in pursuit of the almighty dollar
Loop Capital’s Alan Gould turned bullish on Netflix Inc. shares
NFLX,
Friday, citing the strikes as one possible catalyst. “The fall TV season will be mainly sports, unscripted programming and library product,” Gould said, which could drive people toward streaming even more.
KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Brandon Nispel told MarketWatch earlier this week that while traditional media companies like Walt Disney Co.
DIS,
are seeing advertising and affiliate revenue come under pressure due to cord cutting, they also have to figure out how to make streaming work profitably.
See more: Disney’s stock closes at a 9-year low, and it still may not be cheap
Wells Fargo’s Cahall sees Fox Corp.
FOXA,
as the most exposed within media, as nearly half of estimated 2024 sales are “concentrated in domestic affiliate revenue, while the other media companies have much lower relative risk due to larger alternatives businesses.” Fox and MarketWatch parent News Corp. share common ownership.
In broadcasting, Cahall thinks retransmission estimates for Nexstar Media Group Inc.
NXST,
and Sinclair Inc.
SBGI,
are most at risk.
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