• by Wayne Friedman , March 12, 2018

Traditional US pay TV revenues are expected to decline further in the next five years.

Revenues are expected to sink to $75.13 billion in 2023 from $101.71 billion in 2015 -- a 26% drop, says a Digital TV Research study.

Cable TV revenues are estimated to drop to $36.75 billion, while satellite TV will drop to $33.61 billion in 2023, and telco-based services will sink to $4.77 billion in 2023.

Traditional pay TV subscribers will also continue to fall -- to 80.33 million in 2023, from 90.35 million by the end of 2017 and a total of 100.34 million in 2012.

Pay TV penetration will fall to 66.7% in 2023, from 87.6% of TV households in 2013.

Cable will lose a total of 12 million subscribers between 2010 and 2023. Satellite is expected to decline 4.1 million between the end of 2017 and 2023. It fell by nearly 3 million in 2017 alone. Telco-service subscribers will be almost halved that of three years ago -- sinking to 6.3 million from 12.00 million in 2014.

At the same time, traditional pay TV services are growing their virtual MVPDs (digital multichannel video program distributors) -- although profit margins may be smaller, according to analysts.

MoffettNathanson Research estimates new vMVPDs grew by 2.6 million last year (to 4.6 million overall). It says while traditional pay TV providers lost around 3.4%, as of the fourth-quarter 2017, when including virtual MVPDs overall, it is down just 0.7%.