17% of Homes Have Broadband Service, But Not Traditional Pay TV
In the second quarter of 2018, the number of U.S. homes that subscribed to a broadband service but not cable or satellite pay TV rose to 16.9 percent. That's an increase from 14.1 percent in Q2 of 2017. This data comes from a research report by S&P Global.
The stat is another way of looking at American's shifting preferences in video services. More households are getting all their video needs through their broadband account, and it's one reason data use is soaring. Comcast says the average monthly data use for Xfinity.com customers was 151 GB in the first half of 2018, compared to 100 GB for the first half of 2017.
In related news, the researchers at Parks Associates say the cancellation rate for over-the-top (OTT) video services is 18 percent, a figure that's held steady for 3 years.
Subscribers hold onto an OTT service for an average of 30 months, although churn rates are lower for the leading three services (Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu) and higher for most others.
“With OTT service penetration starting to plateau at around 65 percent adoption among U.S. broadband households, the OTT video market is reaching a level of saturation for the services currently available to consumers,” says Hunter Sappington, a research analyst at Parks. “In an increasingly crowded and competitive marketplace where subscriber acquisition costs are high, this plateau highlights the need for services to focus on retention rather than solely acquisition.”
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