Excluding vMVPDs, which deliver live TV over the internet, pay TV will decline 7.2% this year to 66.4 million households, eMarketer revealed in its latest report. That figure will drop to 54.3 million households by the end of 2026.
In its “Q3 2022 Digital Video Trends” report, eMarketer forecasted that non-pay TV households (which include cord-cutters and cord-nevers) will exceed pay TV households next year. Moreover, in 2026, non-pay TV households will outnumber pay TV households by more than 25 million households. With these figures, pay TV households will still outnumber cord-cutter and cord-never households in 2022.
Another way to view cord-cutting is to count vMVPD subscribers as pay TV subscribers. Although vMVPDs are streaming services, their channel lineups, business models, and subscription prices are pretty similar to cable packages. When viewed this way, cord-cutting is still chugging, but at a slower clip, according to eMarketer.
In this analysis, pay TV/vMVPD households will outnumber those that do not pay for these services by about 30 million in 2022. By the end of 2026, that gap will shrink to about 10 million households, but there will still be more pay TV/vMVPD households than non-pay TV/vMVPD households.
“No matter how you cut it, traditional TV viewership is declining. But the way vMVPDs are classified can have a significant impact on how quickly that decline is happening. We forecast that vMVPD households will increase from 15.2 million to 18.4 million between 2022 and 2026,” eMarketer concluded.