The End of Satellite TV?

DirecTV launched their most recent satellite in May of 2015. The company has launched 16 satellites in its history, and with twelve remaining in service is the largest commercial satellite company in the world. AT&T, the owner of DirecTV announced at the end of last year that there would be no more future satellite launches. Satellites don’t last forever, and that announcement marks the beginning of the death of DirecTV. The satellites launched before 2000 are now defunct and the satellites launch after that will start going dark over time.

AT&T is instead going to concentrate of terrestrial cable service delivered over the web. They are now pushing customers to subscribe to DirecTV Now or WatchTV rather than the satellite service. We’ve already seen evidence of this shift and DirecTV was down to 19.6 million customers, having lost a net of 883,000 customers for the first three quarters of 2018. The other satellite company, Dish Networks lost 744,000 customers in the same 9-month period.

DirecTV is still the second largest cable provider, now 2.5 million customers smaller than Comcast, but 3 million customers larger than Charter. It can lose a few million customers per year and still remain as a major cable provider for a long time.

In much of rural America, the two satellite companies are the only TV option for millions of customers. Households without good broadband don’t have the option of going online. I was at a meeting with rural folks last week who were describing their painful attempts to stream even a single SD-quality stream over Netflix.

For many years the satellite providers competed on price and were able to keep prices low since they didn’t have to maintain a landline network and the associated technician fleet. However, both satellite providers looked to have abandoned that philosophy. DirecTV just announced rate increase that range from $3 to $8 per month for various packages. They also raised the price for regional sports networks by $1. Dish just announced rate increases that average $6 per month for its packages. These are the two largest rate increases in the history of these companies and will shrink the difference between satellite and terrestrial cable prices.

These rate increases will make it easier for rural cable providers to compete. Many of them have tried to keep rates within a reasonable range of the satellite providers, and these rate increases will shrink the differences in rates.

In the long run the consequences of not having the satellite option will create even more change in a fast-changing industry. For years the satellite companies have been the biggest competitor of the big cable companies – and they don’t just serve in rural America. I recently did a survey in a community of 20,000 where almost half of the households use satellite TV. As the satellite companies drop subscribers, some of them will revert to traditional cable providers. The recent price increases ought to accelerate that shift.

Nobody has a crystal ball for the cable industry. Just a year ago it seemed like industry-wide consensus that we were going to see a rapid acceleration of cord cutting. While cord cutting gets a lot of headlines, it hasn’t yet grown to nearly the same magnitude of change that we saw with households dropping telephone landlines. Surprisingly, even after nearly a decade of landline losses there are still around 40% of homes with a landline. Will we see the same thing with traditional cable TV, or will the providers push customers online?

Recently I’ve seen a spate of articles talking about how it’s becoming as expensive to buy online programming as it is to stick with cable companies, and if this becomes the public perception, we might see a slowdown in the pace of cord cutting. It’s possible that traditional cable will be around for a long time. The satellite cable companies lost money for many years, mostly due to low prices. It’s possible that after a few more big rate increases that these companies might become profitable and reconsider their future.

Cord Cutting Might Finally be Here

Fatty_watching_himself_on_TVRecently, Wall Street has been hammering media stocks due to the fact that most of them have reported falling US subscribers. That makes me ask a question I have asked several times before: are we finally seeing the impact of cord cutting? Most cable companies just released 2nd quarter 2015 cable subscriber numbers and except for Verizon FiOS, all of the other large cable providers lost cable customers for the quarter, as follows:

  • DirectTV               -133,000
  • Dish                        -81,000
  • Comcast                 -69,000
  • Time Warner         -45,000
  • Suddenlink            -44,000
  • Charter                  -33,000
  • AT&T                      -22,000
  • CableOne              -21,000
  • Cablevision           -16,000
  • MediaCom            – 3,000

Just for this group of companies that’s a loss of 423,000 cable customers. And the numbers are actually worse. For instance, the Dish numbers might be as high as a loss of 187,000 because they are now netting the gains from Sling TV into the reported today. And Cox is not in these numbers since it’s privately held. The total losses above are something greater than 530,000 for the quarter.

Then you have to consider the fact that historically cable companies would have captured a significant share of new households. With the improved economy there will probably be at least 1 million new households added to US housing this year, and cable would normally have added about 200,000 customers each quarter from these new potential customers. That brings total net losses compared to historic trends to over 700,000 in a quarter.

The large cable companies have been losing customers for several years now. For a while these losses were offset by increases in satellite customers. More recently there was nearly a one-for-one between the losses experienced by the cable companies and the gains of the telcos, mainly AT&T and Verizon. But in this latest quarter Verizon gained only 26,000 and AT&T lost nearly that many, so that sector is no longer growing.

The second quarter is traditionally one of the poorest performing quarters of the year. For example, the cable industry as a whole suffers when campuses shut down for the summer, although those losses generally net out to gains again in the fall. And so it’s unlikely that these losses are going to annualize to the 2 million customers you might expect from these figures. But for the first time there is going to be a significant loss of cable customers for the year.

The cable companies almost all reported improved revenues. Even though they lost a lot of cable customers, the group as a whole gained 377,000 new data customers. Further, the cable companies had significant cable rate increases (although they also had significant increases in programming costs).

But it’s not hard to see how these kinds of losses affect the programmers. Take ESPN – it’s been reported that they charge cable companies more than $5.50 per customer per month. At that rate the loss of 530,000 paying customers annualizes to almost $35 million per year in lost revenues. And if you look at the historic trend including new housing units their loss is even greater than what they traditionally could have expected.

Not reported in the above numbers is the impact of cord shaving. It’s been anecdotally reported that there are a lot of customers cutting back to smaller TV packages, meaning that they are paying for fewer channels. The channels in the premium tiers have to be losing revenue at a significantly higher rate than the basic channels that everybody gets. But the cord shaver numbers are hard to come by and are not reported in cable company press releases.

ESPN is part of Disney which is a very large corporation with diversified revenues, and $35 million lower revenues gets lost in the rounding on their corporate books. But Wall Street is looking at the long term trend and is worried about programmers in general.

Finally, there is another industry measure that may have also spooked Wall Street. Nielsen recently released trends in TV viewing time. Since 2010 viewing hours per week have dropped for all age groups, but particularly for younger viewers. Viewing by 50-64 year old was down 1%, 35-49 year olds down 10%, 25-34 year olds down 23% and 18-24 year olds down a whopping 32%. That speaks tons about the dropping trend for future advertising revenues, which are aimed more heavily at young viewers.

It’s no wonder that Wall Street is punishing the media companies when they are losing revenues from both subscribers and advertising. Many of the programmers are selling enough new content overseas to make up for the US losses, but analysts are obviously worried that this trend is going to quicken in the same manner it did for landline telephones. This could get ugly fairly quickly.