The cable universe is shrinking.
Consolidation, competition and new viewing habits are irrevocably changing the pay TV landscape, with more contraction expected as larger deals close and smaller cable systems are snapped up by their larger peers.
But unlike years past, when deals were driven by a desire to cluster operations more efficiently, the coming consolidation wave seems sparked purely by a need to get bigger — bulking up to roll out new services more effectively and cheaply across a broader base, and to help keep rising programming costs in check. Cable operators aren’t the only ones looking for scale. AT&T completed its $48.5 billion acquisition of DirecTV in July, raising its video-subscriber tally to 26.3 million customers and vaulting the telco to the top of the list of multichannel video-programming distributors (MVPDs). Comcast, which abandoned its $67 billion pursuit of Time Warner Cable in April when it determined regulators would not sign off on the deal, is still a solid No. 2 with 22.3 million subscribers.
Charter Communications, which started the whole consolidation wave in 2014 when it began a dogged pursuit of Time Warner Cable, finally won that prize with its May agreement to purchase the 10.8 million-subscriber TWC for $78.7 billion. That deal is expected to close by the end of the year, and with Charter’s $10 billion purchase of Bright House Networks — also expected to close in December — the Stamford, Conn.-based operator will have 17.2 million customers with which to spread the operating acumen of CEO Tom Rutledge.
CATCHING THE WAVE
Charter is expected to at least look at other potential acquisitions, but others are not sitting idly by. European telecom giant Altice agreed to purchase a 70% interest in Suddenlink Communications for $9.1 billion, and has said it will use the midsized St. Louis-based cable company as a vehicle to expand its U.S. presence.
Already, Altice chairman Patrick Drahi has named Cox Communications and Cablevision Systems as potential targets. And though Cox has insisted it isn’t for sale — and there is some doubt as to whether Altice could pay Cablevision’s price — there is no doubt that further consolidation is coming.
In a recent report, MoffettNathanson principal and senior analyst Craig Moffett said possible acquisition targets could include some of the larger operators at the lower end of the top 10 — Mediacom Communications, Cable One or WideOpenWest.
“It would be foolish to dismiss the idea that any or all of them might be acquired,” Moffett wrote.
And the cable industry has a long history of acquisition. For example, only three of the Top 25 MSOs of 1985 still exist today (Cox, Cablevision and Comcast); the rest have been assumed by other entities. Five of the Top 25 of 1995 are in business today — Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Cox, Cablevision and Charter — with TWC expected to be swallowed by Charter by year-end.
Cable operators stopped growing their basic-video subscriber rolls more than a decade ago. The industry peaked at about 66.9 million total subscribers in 2001, and in 2014, it finished the year with a total of about 54 million subscribers, according to the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. Broadband, for years the profit center of the business, emerged as the subscriber leader last year — the first year that cable broadband customers exceeded video subscribers.
While that had been anticipated — and in some cases, encouraged — for years, cable operators are beginning to turn the corner on basic-video subscriber growth. The four top cable service providers have drastically reduced their customer losses over the past three years; Comcast alone has cut losses by nearly 75% since 2010.
Telcos, which had been engines of video-subscriber growth for more than a decade, began reporting losses for the first time in the second quarter. AT&T said it lost about 22,000 U-verse TV customers in the most recent quarter, while Verizon Communications saw its growth cool considerably, adding 26,000 FiOS TV customers in the period compared to 100,000 additions in the prior year.
At the same time, satellite subscriber growth has stalled — DirecTV lost 133,000 net subscribers in the second quarter, well below the 60,000 additions in the first three months of the year. No. 2 satellite company Dish Network lost 81,000 net subscribers in the second quarter, almost twice the 44,000 it lost during the previous year.
Dish Network lost about 79,000 net subscribers in 2014, compared to a gain of 1,000 in 2013.
DISRUPTING THE DISRUPTOR
As satellite- and telco-TV service stagnates, a new distribution model is disrupting TV’s early disruptor — cable operators. Over-the-top services like Sling TV, HBO Now and Sony’s PlayStation Vue have burst onto the scene with much fanfare, and pay TV operators who may have dismissed those services in the past are now scrambling to come up with their own solutions.
In the second quarter, pay TV lost its traditional growth engines — satellite TV was down 284,000 customers while telco TV providers lost 2,000 subscribers — and perennial loss leader cable cut its losses almost in half to 280,000 from 534,000 a year ago.
Indeed, pay TV subscriber growth dipped to a record low of -0.7% in the past 12 months, according to Moffett. The pay TV industry lost 566,000 subscribers in the second quarter, 76% worse than the 321,000 it lost during the same period in 2014.
With more OTT services slated to launch later this year — Verizon is expected to debut its “mobile-only” Go90 service in the late summer and other programmers are considering launching their own direct-to-consumer services — cord-cutting will likely get worse. And cable operators will likely meet the challenge by trying to add scale.
But just how many customers will migrate over remains to be seen. Years of consolidation have narrowed the number of large available properties. While there are about 660 cable operators and 5,208 cable systems in the United States, more than 80% of the nation’s 116 million TV households are represented by the top eight MVPDs.
And unlike other years when an MVPD could buy the operator below it on the list and move up several spots on the list, today the fifth-largest provider (Verizon) could could buy the next three largest distributors below it and still be stuck at No. 5 with 13.7 million customers, behind Dish Network’s 13.9 million subscribers.
To see the current and historic lists of Top 25 MVPDs, please click here.
