Predictably, the rate of video cord cutting continued to accelerate for most leading operators in 2023, but the industry, ostensibly fading to black, experienced several key changes last year, not all of them bleak.
For starters, there's a new top dawg in the U.S. pay TV business, with Charter Communications -- which is bleeding customers at a slower rate than Comcast -- narrowly surpassing its frequent cable-biz JV partner in terms of video subscriber count in Q4.
Secondly, while the seven pay TV companies still publicly reporting customer tallies collectively lost 4.566 million video customers in 2023, Alphabet/Google said that YouTube TV gained around 3 million subscribers from July 2022 through the end of last year.
Prorating that addition to just a 2023 estimation, YouTube took on around 2 million linear TV customers last year, expanding its ranks at a rather astounding 33%.
YouTube TV is on the cusp of surpassing Dish Network as the No. 4 U.S. supplier overall. DirecTV, which hasn't reported customer numbers since it was spun off from AT&T in 2021, is believed to have around 11.5 million remaining subscribers across its various platforms.
Even thought Alphabet doesn't give specific customer totals for YouTube TV, we included the virtual MVPD in our ranking of the eight leading publicly traded pay TV operators below.
