Traditional US video losses slow
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Editor
| 25 August 2021
In what passes for good news in an industry that has taken a battering over the last few years, research from Kagan has revealed that the pace of erosion in the traditional US multichannel industry has showed slight improvement in the second quarter of 2021 without fundamentally altering the longer-term trajectory.
Residential multichannel subscriptions Kagan 25Aug2021
The study showed losses to cable, telco and satellite video services slowed from the year-ago period to 1.5 million and were accompanied by improvements to the comparisons for the first six months and trailing 12-month periods from 2020.

Yet Kagan’s Q2 2021 US multichannel subscribers report also found that continued sluggish virtual multichannel growth hampered progress in maintaining the number of subscriptions to a package of live linear network and on-demand content represented by the combined traditional and virtual multichannel segments. Kagan found that the combined virtual and traditional multichannel households accounted for 64.3% of occupied households at 83.1 million residential subscriptions.

Kagan's study observed that virtual multichannel players eked out a 0.7% sequential uptick in subscribers, passing 13 million customers. The segment gained 2.7 million subscribers in the 12 months ended June 30, 2021. Cable losses slowed sequentially but on a dark note, for the six-month period ended 30 June 2021, the sector had its largest decline on record, topping the previous trough logged in 2020 by nearly 10%.

Even though satellite multichannel logged its smallest quarterly net losses since the second quarter of 2018, Kagan said the segment remains on a seemingly inexorable downward trajectory, ending the period with an estimated 20.5 million subscribers, down 39% from its first-quarter 2014 peak.

Telco video subs also slumped. The 7.3 million overall losses were driven by the estimated 7.5% sequential decline in AT&T U-verse subscribers, while Verizon Fios notched a more moderate 1.6% slide, a pace more in line with the cable sector.