Kagan: Cable In For Growing Pains

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Here’s a statistic that only reaffirms the notion that cord-cutting is highly impacting MVPDs across the U.S.: Broadband-only households are set to grow from 19 million in 2017 to 37.2 million by 2022


That somewhat alarming fact comes from a newly issued report from Kagan, the media research group within S&P Global Market Intelligence.

“A perfect storm of long-term trends including increase in streaming content suppliers, widespread utility-like status of broadband, and a demographic shift attributable to shrinking baby boomers and rising millennials, is yielding higher broadband-only home gains than initially anticipated, prompting a significant upward update for our projections,” said Tony Lenoir, Senior Kagan Research Analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence.

So, what’s the bad news for cable television operators already pressed with rising retransmission fees?

Kagan expects 38.4% of the combined residential cable and telco wireline broadband subscribers in 2022 to eschew legacy multichannel distribution and rely mostly on a combination of broadband and over-the-air broadcast signals for home video entertainment.

What else did Kagan find?

  • Kagan expects broadband-only homes, or households without a traditional multichannel video package but a subscription to wireline broadband, to rise at a 14.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2017 to 2022.
  • Broadband-only homes are set to take up 29.2% of U.S. occupied households by 2022. Kagan expects traditional multichannel penetration to be in the low 60% range at that time.
  • Operators that offer video as well as broadband may be in an advantageous position. By 2020, cable will count more than 70 million broadband customers. The sector’s video subscriber count peaked at 67.1 million in 2001.

No further information was publicly revealed by Kagan.