Sports TV Fans Likely To Be 'Sticky' With Pay Services, Fewer Cord-Cutters
- by Wayne Friedman , September 23, 2019
A new study says regular TV sports viewers are not likely to be “cord cutters,” and they tend to be “sticky” with traditional pay TV platforms -- cable, satellite, telco, and virtual.
Ninety percent of sports fans who watch sports regularly are pay tv subscribers -- with 70% subscribing to traditional services, 11% to virtual pay TV services, and 7% being “cord-cutters” who have dropped their traditional pay TV packages, according to Altman Vilandrie & Company, a leading strategy consulting firm, in a survey partnership with MoffettNathanson Research.
By contrast, 67% of sports non-viewers are subscribing to a traditional pay TV service. Among "non-sports" individuals, "cord-cutters" and "cord-nevers" are nearly three to five times more likely to subscribe than sports fans.
Sports fans who have a traditional pay TV service amount to 70 to 75 million, from a total traditional pay TV universe of around 88 million to 90 million.
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Overall, 120 million U.S. TV households and 53% of the market self-identified as sports fans, the report says.
New efforts to legalize sports gambling in many states have led analysts to believe sports TV viewing will rise. Overall, 90% of those who are frequent gamblers are pay TV subscribers, while 86% are occasional gamblers. The latter represents 17% of respondents.
The report notes that Fox Television Network has the highest percentage of broadcast viewers' total day commercial TV gross rating points, at70%, with 29% for NBC, 19% for CBS, and 12% for ABC.
Good report, Wayne. If you dig deeper into the findings---as we did for our Media Dynamics Inc MDI Direct subscribers---- it is very clear that sports as well as news are the main reasons for keeping "pay TV" subscriptions, though it's also true that other genres not specifically measured in this study--reality, talk, games, etc.--- also are a factor.