• VideoNuze Podcast #499: AT&T is Bleeding Pay-TV Subscribers, Leading to 2020 Surge in Cord-Cutting

    I’m pleased to present the 499th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

    Earlier this week AT&T reported its Q4 ’19 earnings. There was plenty of lousy news, and as Colin and I discuss, at the top of the list was a loss of over 1.1 million pay-TV subscribers in the quarter, compared with 658K subs lost in Q4 ’18. For the full year, AT&T lost 4.1 million, more than 5x the 750K it lost in 2018. The combined 4.8 million subs that AT&T has lost in the past 2 years is nearly 20% of what it started with back on Dec. 31, 2017.

    There is arguably no bigger influence on the pay-TV industry’s overall cord-cutting rate than AT&T because of its sheer size and outlier loss level. All of that - and lots of other factors - lead us to believe that the rate of cord-cutting is actually going to accelerate in 2020. Colin has crunched the numbers and believes when all the Q4 results are reported, the traditional industry (not including vMVPDs’ gains) will probably lose around 6.5-7 million subs in 2019. He sees that escalating to around 8.5 million in 2020.

    We dig deeply into all of this on the podcast. We all have a front row seat to an industry in complete transformation. As it has in countless other industries, we are watching the Internet massively disrupt the pay-TV and TV industries.
     
    Listen in to learn more!

     
    Click here to listen to the podcast (24 minutes, 11 seconds)



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