Legacy Pay TV, Streaming See Rising Q4 Subscriber 'Churn'
- by Wayne Friedman , March 2, 2023
Streaming platform growth is seeing some softening amidst rising competition -- and cord-cutting of legacy pay TV also continues to grow.
A recent fourth-quarter 2022 report from TiVo says 28.8% plan to drop their pay TV service in the next six months, up from 24.2% in the fourth quarter of 2021.
At the time, the survey noted rising "churn" among individual streaming platforms -- 26.6% dropped a subscription service (up from 18.2% the year before). In addition, 34.4% added a subscription service (up from 27.4%).
Netflix has been the most “churned” service -- over 27% of all respondents who recently canceled a service dropped the subscription service. (This is up 8% from a year ago.) Farther down the list in second place was Hulu, with 9.1% saying they dropped the service, followed by Amazon Prime Video at 8.4%; Apple TV+, 8.1%; Paramount+, 5.9%; Disney+, 5.8%; and HBO Max, 4.7%.
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Discovery+ posted the best result in this group, with just 3.8% saying they had dropped the service in the period.
The biggest reason to drop a streamer was rising prices. The second-biggest reason was that users “were not using it enough.”
The fourth-quarter survey was conducted among 4,493 U.S. and Canadian citizens 18 years and older, and was done by a third party.
Wayne,what would be interesting---and possibly informative---would be to take previous studies of this nature---say from three years ago---and calculate how many homes would still have "pay TV" now if the old studies were accurate predictors. I seem to recall that the old studies were also reporting that huge numbers---25-30% ---of "pay TV" subs were planning to cancel in the near future so by now---or maybe by last year--- shouldnt "pay TV penetration have declined to zero---or worse?