The traditional TV industry could be in for a historically brutal quarter.
Pay TV providers could lose more than a million subscribers in the current period, a team of analysts at UBS led by John C. Hodulik wrote in a research note distributed Tuesday.
"That would be the worst result on record and equate to a 2.5% annual decline," compared to 2.1% last quarter, the analysts wrote.
And things for the industry could only get worse, the analysts wrote.
"We estimate this will put the industry on pace for a 3.3% decline in 2017 and 4.0% in 2018," they said in their note.
Over the last few years, there has been a fierce debate over whether "cord-cutting" — people ditching their expensive cable TV packages — is a trend, or an overblown media narrative. But recent results make it hard to say "nothing" is going on. The pay-TV industry already lost about 762,000 subscribers in the first quarter this year, according to MoffettNathanson.
“For the better part of fifteen years, pundits have predicted that cord-cutting was the future. Well, the future has arrived,” industry analyst Craig Moffett wrote in a report about the Q1 results.
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