• by Wayne Friedman , September 3, 2013

Multichannel TV-video services -- cable, satellite, and telco -- continue to lose ground in building subscribers, although losses are a bit better than a year ago.

TV-video providers lost a collective total of 366,000 video subscriptions in the second quarter -- an improvement of nearly 11% to the loss posted in the year-ago quarter, according to Monterey, Calif.-based SNL Kagan.

Looking at individual TV-video services, cable doubled its loss from the previous quarter with a decline of 607,000, which was a slight improvement from the year-ago measure. In the last 12 months, the basic video tally lost by 1.8 million. Cable's share of the TV-video subscription market dropped to 55.3%. Other estimates say this amounts to around 58 million to 60 million.

Satellite TV programming services did not fare much better -- losing 162,000 in the second quarter, its largest quarterly decline ever. It now has 34 million subscribers.

By contrast, telco companies TV-video services added 400,000 in the period, now totaling 10.7 million total video customers as of mid-2013.

While the pay TV-video trends are generally dropping, SNL Kagan says the picture is somewhat brighter now: looking back to the second quarter of 2011, there was a small uptick in combined subscriptions of 121,000 for the past 24 months.