Cord Cutting Is Hitting Comcast Harder Than Ever

For a while there, everybody's least favorite cable company, Comcast, was weathering the cord cutting revolution fairly well. The company's losses on the cable TV side could simply be recouped over on its broadband side, where a monopoly protected it from having to actually, you know, try.

Things have shifted. Last year, Comcast saw a record 11 percent of its customer base cancel their Comcast cable service in favor of streaming video, over the air broadcasts, or free services like TikTok. And the company lost lost 440,000 traditional video customers in the fourth quarter of 2022 alone, a big bump over the 227,000 customers it lost in the last three months of 2021.

Overall, Internet disruption hasn't been kind to the cable giant, and it appears to only be getting worse:

Worse, the 2.034 million pay TV customers lost by Comcast in 2022 was a significant uptick over the 1.67 million lost in 2021. Overall, Comcast's pay TV base eroded by a huge 11.2% last year, and it now serves only around 16.1 million subscribers. Just three years ago, that figure stood at nearly 20 million customers.

The company has had some better success with its own streaming video service, Peacock, adding five million new customers in one quarter. The problem: those users pay significantly less money than the traditional cable customers they're losing, and Peacock itself has been a net loss so far:

Peacock's quarterly losses grew to $978 million from Oct. 1 - Dec. 31. In Q3, Peacock reported losses of $614 million. For all of 2022, Comcast and NBCU lost around $3 billion - the peak", they claim - building Peacock.

Comcast still has its broadband monopoly to protect itself from pesky innovation. But even that's facing some new challenges. Fixed 5G wireless providers are starting to nibble away at the company's frustrated subscriber base, and cooperatives, utilities, and municipalities - buoyed by an historic infusion of broadband subsidies - are also gaining steam.

At this rate Comcast may, someday in the not so distant future, be required to actually try.