NEW YORK—Nearly 7.2 million traditional multichannel (MVPD) subscribers opted to cancel their subscriptions in 2020, according to a recent report from Kagan, an S&P Global Market Intelligence media research group.
The 7.2 million combines traditional cable, telco and satellite pay-TV services. According to Kagan, at the end of 2020, only 57% of U.S. occupied households only had a traditional MVPD service. That number is better when combined with a virtual MVPD, with about two-thirds (66.6%) of households having a traditional service and a vMVPD, though that is still down from 2019.
The growth of vMVPD helped mitigate the number of people that dropped live linear channel packages, with 2.7 million new subscribers, but it was not enough to offset traditional MVPDs losses.
MVPD losses did slow in the fourth quarter of 2020, with a total subscription loss of 1.5 million, but vMVPD did not maintain its momentum from the third quarter, per Kagan, netting 223,000.
“[T]he full year decline underscored that the impacts of the pandemic amplified cord-cutting instead of insulating an industry built around home entertainment,” said Kagan.
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