Cable companies can try to downplay cord-cutting all they want, but even if consumers aren’t rushing to get rid of pay-TV plans, the fact is that the Internet has quickly become more important than cable and is likely to become the dominant business for cable providers.
Comcast has released its quarterly earnings report [PDF] and once again the pay-TV customer numbers have slipped while the company’s broadband growth continues.
The company lost only 8,000 net cable TV subscribers during the last quarter, but is down more than 225,000 customers over the same quarter a year ago. Meanwhile, Comcast added a whopping net 407,000 broadband subscribers in just the last quarter. Since a year ago, this part of the company’s business has grown by 1.3 million.
As things stand now, Comcast’s pay-TV customer base is only 6,000 subscribers larger than its number of broadband subscribers. It seems inevitable that the number of Internet customers will finally pass cable during the next quarter.
The good news for the pay-TV industry might be that the decrease in cable subscribers was smaller than in some recent quarters. For example, in the second quarter of 2014, Comcast had a net loss of 144,000 pay-TV customers. A year before that, the company’s net cable loss was 162,000 subscribers. As recently as the third quarter of 2014, Comcast lost a net 81,000 pay-TV customers. With today’s report, cable customer growth has remained reasonably flat for two quarters.
However, cable still remains as the primary revenue source for Comcast, bringing in $5.3 billion last quarter, compared to the $3.04 billion in revenue earned from broadband.
by Chris Morran via Consumerist
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