Reuters says more than 400,000 Americans have dropped pay TV this year. If you want to evaluate the state of the pay-TV business, you have to include the results from the telco guys, who have been taking share from the cable and satellite guys. And you have to look at numbers for the whole year, not a single quarter. Once you do that, you end up with numbers that are basically flat, give or take a few thousand subscribers.
You can argue that the pay-TV industry’s no-growth or barely-there growth is due to a weak economy and lousy household formation numbers. Or you can argue that it’s because people really are swapping out pay TV for Netflix, Apple TV, etc. Or a mix of both, or whatever.
But for now, at least, you can’t argue that the pay-TV industry is shrinking.
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