U.S. Pay-TV Penetration Down to 62 Percent

Parks Associates is reporting that 62 percent of U.S. broadband households subscribe to a traditional pay-TV service via a cable or satellite provider, down from 69 percent in the first quarter of 2019.

This slip in penetration comes even as the average amount of video watched per week has spiked to more than 37 hours per household.

“The explosion of online viewing options and video consumption came at the same time many shelter-in-place orders were enacted,” said Steve Nason, research director at Parks Associates. “Households are relying more and more on OTT services for a top-quality entertainment experience. The spike in online video consumption, the decrease in pay-TV-only households, and the shift of pay-TV online are widening the gap between OTT and traditional pay-TV. Traditional services are looking to migrate to the cloud to get the best of pay-TV and OTT.”

“We are witnessing a paradigm shift in the pay-TV industry across the board, with operators acknowledging the benefits of putting Cloud TV at the heart of their infrastructure,” added Nuno Sanches, general manager for media and telecom at Kaltura. “Just five years ago it was considered impossible to deliver operator-grade Quality-of-Service from the cloud. The economics was perceived to be too expensive, and it seemed that telecom operators would not accept the perceived loss of control involved in utilizing the open internet to deliver pay-TV services. But today, we have multinational pay-TV operators embracing Cloud TV as the best-of-breed solution to deliver future-proof services.”