Top Wall Street Analyst: Pay TV “Cord-Cutting Is Real”

One simple message stands out in Craig Moffett’s latest report on the pay-TV business: “cord-cutting is real.”

Citing the largest year-over-year pay-TV subscriber slide yet that occurred in the first quarter of the year, Moffett didn’t mince words: “Pay TV is unmistakably declining and the rate of penetration decline is accelerating. The very fact that there have recently been more new households being minted each year than there have been new pay-TV households is proof positive that cord cutting is real.” While making abundantly clear that this cord-cutting evidence didn’t mean “seismic changes” were just around the corner for the industry, Moffett projected that the pay-TV penetration rate would sink from 87.9% this year to 82% by 2020. He characterized the cost-cutting population as being 1.9 million strong — though that’s a drop in the bucket against a pay-TV populace totaling over 100 million in the US.