It Was a Q1 Bloodbath for Pay TV, But 5G Home Wireless Is Picking Up Steam

It was another shellacking for old-school pay TV providers in Q1 2023, and while there were some increases in high-speed internet users, it was not as much as in the recent past, according to data from Leichtman Research Group(Opens in a new window).

The big deal in broadband continues to be fixed wireless service, in particular Verizon 5G Home and T-Mobile Home Internet. Both use 5G towers as internet backbones for home connectivity. The two companies alone account for 916,000 new subscribers in Q1, bringing the number of fixed wireless users up to 5,035,000.

That’s a good thing, because across broadband, the subscriber gain was only 962,226—5G fixed wireless users account for 95% of the net additions.

Some of the major cable companies (in particular Altice, which owns the Optimum brand, and Breezeline, formerly Atlantic Broadband) and wireline phone companies (AT&T and Lumen, the former CenturyLink) had big broadband subscriber losses. In one case, that’s surprising: AT&T Fiber just won our Readers’ Choice award for 2023 ISPs, as it did in 2022.

The biggest subscriber gains for cable came to Charter (Spectrum), and for phone companies, to Verizon and Frontier. But those increases are minor compared with gains for T-Mobile and Verizon on fixed wireless/5G home internet services.

(Credit: Leichtman Research Group)

These broadband numbers are in keeping with the stats Leichtman published for all of 2022, which were in direct contrast with the cable gains of 2021. Back then, we were still in the throes of the full-blown pandemic, and pay TV saw more gains.

And what about those pay-TV services, many of which double as broadband providers? Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, say “pay TV net losses of about 2.2 million in 1Q 2023 were more than in any previous quarter.”

In fact, every single cable-, dish-, and fiber-based pay-TV provider shows a net loss in subscribers. Comcast alone shed 614,000.

The only vendor on the pay-TV list that experienced a gain is YouTube TV. That service falls under what Leichtman calls “internet-delivered” TV, also known in advertising as a vMVPD (virtual multichannel video programming distributor). We at PCMag call it a live TV streaming service. YouTube TV had an estimated 100,000-user increase in Q1, the only vendor in the report to show gains. Hulu + Live TV, Sling TV, and Fubo are all down.

(Credit: Leichtman Research Group)

That means there were about 2.2 million fewer pay-TV users in Q1 2023. With only 962,000 new broadband customers—almost all using fixed wireless—those cord cutters aren’t spending their savings to go online.

Note that these numbers are estimates by Leichtman Research Group, including those for YouTube TV, which doesn’t make numbers available very often.