Pay-TV Penetration Sinks to 1995 Levels as vMVPDs Lose Steam: MoffettNathanson

as subs in 1988, the analysts said Friday. More distressing is where those customers didn’t go, wrote analyst Craig Moffett. VMVPDs, once viewed as “the last line of defense for cable networks, imploded in Q1,” and Moffett estimates the vMVPD category lost about 341,000 subscribers. Sony’s half a million PlayStation Vue service customers appear to have gone “nowhere” after the service shut down in January; AT&T TV Now, Sling TV and fuboTV lost subs, he said. Disney’s Hulu Live TV appears to “have hit a wall” after price increases, growing by about 100,000, “an abrupt deceleration from their recent torrid growth,” said Moffett. Numbers will drop this quarter, with sports off the air and unemployment taking hold, Moffett said. Combined traditional and vMVPDs subscriptions are shrinking 5.3% yearly, also setting a new low. Q1's sub loss "was hardly a surprise. No one has tried harder to avoid this outcome than ACA Connects and" its MVPD members, emailed the association's spokesperson. "Programmers and broadcasters have only themselves to blame. They demanded untenable rate increases year after year, forcing MVPDs to provide their customers with dozens of programming channels they didn’t want." The cost for "pay TV programming is four times higher than local TV, even though broadcast ratings dwarf that of cable," emailed an NAB spokesperson. He cited SNL Kagan data. NCTA didn't comment on MoffettNathanson's predictions. COVID-19 is stoking the cord-cutting trend, said Moffett, and even the return of sports is unlikely to bring back pay-TV customers who left traditional or vMVPDs. “The underlying causes for the defections are not transitory,” he said, raising the possibility of a “rapid death spiral for the entire category.”