Cable, satellite-based pay-TV services subs rate maintains fall
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Joseph O'Halloran
| 25 August 2020
Even as the average amount of video watched per week has spiked to more than 37 hours per household, the number of US broadband households subscribing to a traditional pay-TV service via a cable or satellite provider is continuing with its downward trajectory as users increasingly adopt online services says a study from Parks Associates.

Parks Penetration OTT vs Traditional Pay TV 25Aug2020Having found that a tipping point between online and traditional services was reached in the third quarter of 2018, the new study shows that at the end of the first quarter of 2020, traditional TV subs fell 7 percentage points in a year to 62%.

“The explosion of online viewing options and video consumption came at the same time many shelter-in-place orders were enacted,” said Steve Nason, research director, Parks Associates commenting on the study. “Households are relying more and more on OTT services for a top-quality entertainment experience. The spike in online video consumption, the decrease in pay-TV-only households, and the shift of pay-TV online are widening the gap between OTT and traditional pay-TV. Traditional services are looking to migrate to the cloud to get the best of pay-TV and OTT.”

Offering his perspective on the study and industry dynamics in general, Nuno Sanches, general manager, Media & Telecom of video technology services provider Kaltura said that the industry was witnessing a paradigm shift in the pay-TV industry across the board, with operators acknowledging the benefits of putting cloud TV at the heart of their infrastructure. “Just five years ago it was considered impossible to deliver operator-grade quality-of-service from the cloud,” he observed.

“The economics was perceived to be too expensive, and it seemed that telecom operators would not accept the perceived loss of control involved in utilising the open internet to deliver pay-TV services. But today, we have multinational pay-TV operators embracing cloud TV as the best-of-breed solution to deliver future-proof services.”