Can pay TV still pay off for telecom providers? That’s perhaps the most pressing question facing cablecos and other pay TV providers in North America, particularly in the U.S. Even as the U.S. premium video market continues to grow, cable operators, satellite providers and telcos have all been shedding video customers by the boatload over the past few years. As a result, the pay-TV business is paying increasingly smaller dividends for legacy multi-channel video providers (MVPDs). Indeed, in the first quarter of this year alone, conventional U.S. pay-TV providers combined to lose a staggering 2.03 million video subscribers. And that huge loss came after they ended las year with 43 million pay-TV customers, down 58% from the industry high of 101 million subs in 2012, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data. Paradoxically, these customer losses have been occurring even as overall video subscription revenues for the U.S. pay-TV industry keep hitting new highs, thanks manly to the growth of subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) streamers like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and Disney as well as such virtual multi-channel video programming distributors (vMVPDs) as YouTube TV, Sling TV and DirecTV Stream. In fact, S&P Global estimates that the entire U.S. pay-TV sector generated nearly $150 billion in revenue last year, with traditional pay-TV operators and the SVOD players each contributing around $62 billion to that total. “The (pay TV) space is still growing, but it’s a complicated mess,” noted John Fletcher, senior research analyst for telecommunications, media and technology in S&P Global’s Kagan consumer tech and telecoms unit. In a May report, S&P noted that even with many consumers cutting the cord on traditional pay-TV services, SVODs and vMVPDs have driven overall video revenue growth since 2019. As bad as the video subscriber decline in the first quarter was, it actually marked a slight improvement from a year earlier, when the U.S. pay-TV sector coughed up a whopping 2.17 million subs in the first quarter. But that’s not exactly something to boast about. Indeed, despite consumers’ nearly insatiable appetite for video content, both traditional and virtual pay-TV providers
Letter from the Americas In EVERY ISSUE, industry journalist Alan Breznick reports on the evolving broadband, telecoms and technology landscape in the Americas BY Alan Breznick North American Correspondent Is There Still Hope for Cable Video?
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SEPTEMBER 2026 Volume 48 No.3
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