There's no sugarcoating just how bad things have gotten for cable companies: During just the first six months of 2024, a whopping 4 million U.S. homes exited the pay TV bundle, according to research from MoffettNathanson. That number will rise to over 6 million defectors by year's end, the company forecasts, shrinking the total number of homes who pay for a traditional cable package - i.e., not including services like YouTube TV - to just under 47 million.
As analyst Craig Moffett put it in a report a few weeks ago, "The pay-TV ecosystem as we know it continues its inexorable decline." And yet, as dire as things are for big cable, recent developments suggest that maybe, just maybe, the industry is finally getting serious about finding a way to slow the pace of cord-cutting.
Late last week, Charter Communications hammered out a new distribution deal with Warner Bros. Discovery, which will result in most of Charter's Spectrum video customers getting access to the ad-supported versions of WBD's Max and Discovery+ as part of their cable package. The agreement means Spectrum now has a potentially very powerful argument to present to customers: Keep your cable package, and we'll cover the subscription fees for most of the major streaming platforms not named Netflix.
Most Spectrum customers who will get access to this deal already pay more than $80 per month for video programming. And more importantly, Charter will still be paying WBD a wholesale price for Max.
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