LETTER FROM THE AMERICAS
Streaming video providers have taken their place as the kings of the pay TV market.
streaming services… It could be cost- effective to go back.”
business services while letting its legacy pay-TV business wither away.
No matter what strategy they adopt, though, cable operators may ultimately have to satisfy themselves with simply stopping the video bleeding or at least slowing it down. Market analysts agree that the industry is never going to return to its video heyday of yesteryear. “I don’t see them getting back the subscribers,” said Chris Bastian, former CTO of the SCTE, A Subsidiary of CableLabs in the U.S., and now an industry consultant. “They’re trying to hold onto them as long as they can.”
As a result, Cable One now has at least nine times as many broadband subscribers as video customers. In late 2023, Laulis acknowledged that fact, declaring that the cableco had entered the “final stages of decline for our video product.” Despite such moves by Cable One and other small and midsized operators, though, market analysts don’t believe cable’s video days will be over any time soon. They note that, even with the hefty subscriber losses of the past decade, video margins remain reasonably healthy, at least for the largest operators like Comcast and Charter. “They’re still making a lot of money,” Fletcher noted. “They’re charging a lot of money for that stuff.” Cyclical market trends Market analysts also believe that cable operators could fight back against their rivals by re-creating the old pay-TV bundle, only in somewhat new form. That’s exactly what Comcast and Charter are trying to do with Xumo. “I’m very curious to see if the pendulum swings back,” said Jaimie Lenderman, practice leader for optical, IP, and broadband network infrastructure at Omdia. “It’s easy to oversubscribe to
But maybe that’s enough. That certainly seems to be Charter’s view these days.
“We don’t have to grow [video subscribers] for it to be a big advantage in the business,” Jessica Flecher said. “If there’s less drag from video, the trajectory of the broader business is in a different place. … I think even if where we get is to stabilise [video], we will have driven a lot of value back into the business.” So don’t write that epitaph for North American cable video just yet. Legacy pay TV may still have some life left in it after all.
Volume 48 No.23 SEPTEMBER 2026
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