The top 6 cable, satellite and telco pay TV operators in the second quarter of 2021: Ranking Comcast, DirecTV, Charter and more

Video subscriber count: 18.95 million

399,000 video subscriber losses in the second quarter

Among U.S. cable operators, Comcast has been dropping video subscribers at the fastest rate. But during the second quarter, the company may have seen a bright spot, however faint.

According to MoffettNathanson, Comcast’s rate of video subscriber decline has gotten progressively worse every quarter since the fourth quarter of 2018 when it was 1.7%. Sequentially, it kept getting worse and worse until hitting 7.1% in the first quarter of 2021. But now, there’s been a slight improvement.

“Comcast’s loss of 399K video subscribers (-364K residential and -34K commercial) was not as large as the consensus loss of 491K,” wrote Craig Moffett in a research note. “The loss was meaningfully smaller than last year’s loss of 478K. The decline rate of the base moderated to 6.9%, from 7.1% last quarter.”

It may not be much but it could suggest that Comcast’s video subscriber losses are starting to normalize as it gets down to an install base of customers who aren’t interested in cutting the cord, hunting for live sports and news, and building their own entertainment packages.

Video subscriber count: 16.01 million

50,000 video subscriber losses in the second quarter

Charter has consistently either added video subscribers or mitigated losses for several consecutive quarters now and it largely has rapid broadband growth to thank for that.

CEO Tom Rutledge also attributed his company’s video subscriber trends to selling different video packages that he said are more tailored to consumer needs.

“To some extent, we think our video business is stabilizing. But, on the other hand, the fundamentals trends haven’t stopped, which is that prices are being continuously passed through to consumers and there’s real pressure on the total cost of the bundle,” he said. “The reason we’re relatively better is that we’ve been moderate with our pricing and we’ve created new packages that cost less.”

Charter also has plans to become an aggregated video store for its customers and it reached a recent renewal with ViacomCBS that took concrete steps in that direction by including Paramount+ and other services for “future distribution.”

Rutledge called the ViacomCBS deal a “modern agreement” that’s “consistent with our view that we’d like to be part of the marketplace and to enhance our video relationship with customers through managing transactions for them.”

Video subscriber count: 15.4 million

473,000 video subscriber losses in the second quarter

DirecTV—the new name for the combined DirecTV, U-verse and AT&T TV businesses successfully spun off from AT&T—likely won’t be providing quarterly updates on subscribers for the time being.

The new company will for now focus on rolling out new features and functions for DirecTV and DirecTV Stream, its rebranded virtual MVPD. This week DirecTV began sending notices to AT&T TV subscribers to let them know about the transition to DirecTV Stream. GW Shaw, vice president of product management and development at DirecTV, said marketing and messaging for the brand will ramp up in the coming weeks.

As DirecTV reintroduces its brand, the pay TV industry will be watching intently to see how a pure-play, traditional video distribution company makes its way through a landscape besieged by cord cutting and overflowing with streaming video options. Every other company on this list is losing subscribers consistently but they all have either broadband, media, wireless, theme park or business services segments to fall back on. DirecTV will be working without a net.

Video subscriber count: 10.99 million

67,000 video subscriber losses in the second quarter

Dish Network lost more satellite subscribers but held fairly steady overall thanks to Sling TV. During this week’s earnings call, though, most attention was directed toward the company’s wireless buildout and new services agreement with AT&T.

Still, Chairman Charlie Ergen still found a little bit of time to discuss potential mergers and programming standoffs. He reiterated his belief that a Dish Network-DirecTV tie-up is inevitable and that the regulatory path toward such a deal is being made less rocky thanks to ramped up broadband investment and the ensuing expansion of consumer choice when it comes to traditional and streaming video products.

Ergen also touched on Dish’s current impasse with Sinclair over carriage renewal for the company’s network affiliate stations. He assured that the negotiations aren’t going to be tied to Sinclair’s RSNs returning to Dish since most subscribers who wanted those channels have already jumped ship.

“…We don't have any customers calling us on RSNs today to the extent if the local channels were to go down. We would have more than one customer call us the next day and say, ‘Where is my local channel in this particular market?’” he said. “If there is some opportunity on regional sports that makes sense for us and Sinclair, we're happy to talk about anything that's creative and doesn't harm our customers. But we're not interested in taxing our customers when they don't watch the channel. That doesn't make any sense.”

Video subscriber count: 3.71 million

62,000 video subscriber losses in the second quarter

Verizon, much like Altice USA, has a very slowly sinking boat on its hands when it comes to traditional linear video service. The company lost another 62,000 subscribers during the second quarter; an improvement over the 82,000 it lost in the first quarter but still another crack in the hull that’s washed away 20% of Verizon’s video subscriber base over the past four years.

It doesn’t seem to be bothering Verizon all that much. The company hardly spoke about video during its second-quarter earnings call. When it did, it pointed out how Mix & Match—which highlights third-party services like YouTube TV—helped drive more demand for broadband and how partnerships to bundle Disney+, Discovery+ and AMC+ have added value to Verizon’s connectivity products.

“It's not only loyalty, it's actually incremental profit for us,” CEO Hans Vestberg said during an earnings call, according to a Motley Fool transcript. “And ultimately, when we make these customers into paying customers, we get our fair share on that because we, with our assets, have created it together with the assets for Disney+, Discovery or gaming, etc. So that's how the model is working.”

Video subscriber count: 2.87 million

48,000 video subscriber losses in the second quarter

Altice USA continues to drop video subscribers at a modest rate relative to peers like Comcast, though the provider is dealing with a much smaller customer base across its Optimum and Suddenlink brands.

More important to Altice, though, appears to be the shrinking rate at which its customers are packaging video service with their broadband. CEO Dexter Goei said that two to three years ago, his company’s video attachment rates were in the high-50s to low-60s two but have now dipped down to the 30% to 35% level. That figure helped inform the company’s decision to launch Stream, a video streaming platform and device for its broadband-only subscribers—similar to what Comcast has been doing with Xfinity Flex.

“There is a desire for our…broadband subscribers to have a video product alternative, that's very cheap and cheerful, right?,” said Goei, according to a Motley Fool transcript. “And to the extent that they ever want to get a bundled package on an OTT basis, they can do it also over the Stream product. So, it's really a capex play, being reactive also to what our consumers want and how our consumers are behaving today with most of their activity on the video side, the OTT-based. And if you really look at what we spend and how easy to deploy Stream box versus an Altice One box, it's a no-brainer.”