Research from Dataxis has found that the US pay-TV subscriber market has shown a small contraction, with the total number of subs at the end of Q2 2017 falling 0.1% year-on-year to 100.2 million.
There were clear winners and losers in the segment, with traditional pay-TV services — cable, DTH and IPTV — falling 1.59% to 96 million subscribers. However, linear over-the-top (OTT) pay-TV contributed to the prevention of the global trend of market erosion that started several quarters ago, continuing to add subscribers, rising 49.6% to 4.4 million subs. Dataxis calculates that linear OTT began to compensate for the loss of subscribers for the pay-TV market as from the end of 2016, occupying a growing proportion with respect to classical technologies.The analyst believes that the leading proponents of OTT pay-TV are becoming more numerous, and noted several traditional operators now have players in this technology. These include Dish, which entered with Sling TV in 2015, and DirecTV, with DirecTV Now in 2016, while Charter and Century Link launched in the second quarter of 2017.
Dataxis observed that along with these classic players, the traditional pay-TV providers face competition from new pay-TV providers like PlayStation Vue and YouTube TV.
