Subsidizing Lost Cable TV Revenue

I’ve been tracking the number of claimed broadband customers at the largest telephone and cable companies for years. When I was looking at the statistics for the first quarter of 2023, it struck me that the biggest cable companies are now making up for the loss of cable TV customers by increasing broadband rates. For the last decade, the big cable companies have been thriving financially through big annual increases in broadband customers. This came year after year as large numbers of customers bailed on DSL, along with organic population growth – the cable companies won most new broadband households. Every traditional cable TV provider started to lose traditional cable TV customers starting around the end of 2018. Since that time, the loss of cable TV customers has accelerated. The margins on broadband are far higher than on cable TV, and as cable TV customers dropped, cable companies continued to add broadband customers, and profits continued to increase. Over the last year, the traditional formula of covering the losses of cable TV customers with the growth of broadband customers came to a screeching halt. It now seems like both big cable companies must make up for losses of cable TV customers through broadband rate increases.