The top 6 cable, satellite and telco pay-TV operators in Q2 of 2021

The second-quarter earnings season has wrapped up for the top publicly traded pay-TV operators in the US, and it's time to break down the numbers. Altice USA, AT&T, Charter Communications, Comcast, Dish Network, and Verizon combined to lose approximately 1.1 million video subscribers during the second quarter across both residential and commercial subscriber bases, down significantly from the 1.6 million combined subscribers lost in the first quarter. Morgan Stanley analyst Benjamin Swinburne estimated that pay-TV subscriber loss rates slowed down substantially. “Pay-TV subscribers declined only 3.9 percent during the quarter…which was ahead of our expectation for a 4.3 percent decline and over 6 percent as we headed into the pandemic last year,” he wrote. “Despite a transforming pay-TV model tethered around app-centric distribution and content consumption through streaming, we think this quarter benefitted from the return to live sports and favorable comps relative to Q2 2020. While the better than feared losses this quarter are encouraging in light of using video to manage broadband churn, we expect the overall pay-TV decline to accelerate to -5.4 percent by year-end.”