If there’s never any ideal timeframe through which to assess the ongoing death-spiral that is the traditional pay-TV bundle, the first quarter of every year is demonstrably the least flattering for the sector. It’s no coincidence that subscribers are more likely to end their commitments during the three-month period when the college football and NFL seasons come to an end, so much so that the last time operators managed to get through a Q1 without losing customers was in 2010.
For what it’s worth, the Q1 gain of 16 years ago was nominal (+1.5%), and it’s been all downhill since. But it’s not just the cable/satellite/telco-TV ops that get roughed up every year, as the virtual MVPDs also take a kicking when all the football goes away; per MoffettNathanson analysis, services like YouTube TV, Sling TV and Hulu/Fubo saw a record 948,000 customers step away during the first quarter of 2026—nearly as many defections as were recorded by the trad bundlers (-1.09 million).
All told, the bundled-TV sub count ended up at 40.9 million subs, which marked a 9.7% drop compared to the year-ago 45.3 million tallied by MoffettNathanson, and a 20.3% drop versus Q1 of 2024. Pull back a bit and the losses are even more vertiginous, as major providers such as Comcast and DirecTV have seen nearly half (48.7%) of their video customers take flight since the COVID-19 pandemic began disrupting day-to-day life in March 2020. Since then, 38.8 million U.S. households have ditched the bundle, a figure that represents a staggering 30.8% of all domestic TV homes.
Go back a full decade and the loss works out to 57.1 million bundled subs since Q1 2016. While the impact of those defections has been mollified somewhat by the vMVPDs, to which some 21.3 million homes now subscribe, the reuptake has slowed considerably. According to a recent MN report, the conversion rate (“or the rate at which customers leaving traditional pay-TV are signing on with vMVPDs”) fell to a record low of 18.9% in Q1. Rewind to the first quarter of 2025, and the conversion rate was 22%, down from 29.6% in Q1 2024 and 42.6% in the analogous period in 2019.
When the vMVPDs are mixed into the pay-TV stew, the total number of homes subscribing to a video service is now at 62.2 million, down a more manageable -5.4% from the year-ago 65.8 million combined subs and off 11.7% versus Q1 2024 (70.5 million). Since the aforementioned quarter in 2020, 27.5 million homes have severed ties with all forms of pay-TV, an exodus that is itself eminently traceable by a glance at the concomitant rise of old-school antenna usage and the ongoing growth of broadband-only homes.
According to Nielsen estimates, 19.5% of all U.S. TV households in February received TV signals via an antenna, which works out to a hair shy of 25 million homes. That’s up from just 14.9% in February 2025, when the antenna-only crowd numbered 18.7 million. During the same yearlong stretch, broadband-only penetration rose from 32.5% to 35.3%, while wired-cable penetration dropped from 25.5% to 21.3%, satellite’s reach fell from 10.5% to 8.4% and vMVPDs slid from a 16.6% share to 15.5%.
The widespread dismissal of monthly pay-TV bills coincides with a steady decline in overall TV usage here in the U.S. Per Nielsen, the average HUT level (industry argot for the percentage of homes using television) plummeted 12.1% to an all-time low of 27.5% in 2025, while the two-year drop was 17.9%. The 12-month average for 2020 was a still-sturdy 45.3%, which works out to a six-year HUT reduction of 39.3%. That slippage rate is outpacing the all-inclusive -30.7% decline in total pay-TV obligations since Q1 2020.
If the broader TV usage trends are grim, the patterns demonstrated by the viewers who are most coveted by advertisers is downright apocalyptic. According to Nielsen, just 7% of the nation’s 134.1 million adults 18-49 were regular consumers of TV in 2025, a mere shadow of the demo’s 35.6% HUT read-out as captured at the beginning of the century. (The dollar demo’s disappearing act is most readily apparent when looking at the average show’s ratings in broadcast prime. In the 2025-26 season that ended just a few weeks ago, the average entertainment series on the Big Four eked out just 390,354 adults under 50 per episode, with targeted impressions accounting for a mere 11.8% of all primetime deliveries.)
HUTs for the even-harder-to-reach cohort of adults 18-34 shrunk from 31.6% in 2021 to a barely-there 4.4% last year, while even the demographically irrelevant horde of adults 55+ seem to have found other things to do with their time, with HUTs dropping from 51.1% at the beginning of the new century to 32.5% in 2025.
As much as the exodus from the bundle has wreaked havoc on overall TV trends, sports appears to be capitalizing on its built-in competitive advantage. Hard data is tough to come by (much of the available research has been culled from the rigorously non-scientific practice of issuing sentiment surveys), but the Nielsen ratings would seem to support the notion that sports fans are far less likely to cut the cord than their sports-averse counterparts who prefer scripted/pre-recorded content.
That live sports remains the mitochondria of the legacy TV model was made particularly evident when the final NFL numbers were tallied up at the end of the league’s 2025-26 campaign. Regular-season deliveries were up to a 36-year high average of 18.7 million viewers per window, trailing only the record high of 19 million in 1989, as every NFL rightsholder enjoyed significant year-over-year gains. The NFL effectively added 1.2 million viewers per game compared to the 2024-25 season, and while the usual caveats about Nielsen’s upgrade to its ratings currency apply here, it’s unlikely that the big audience boost was entirely informed by the revised methodology.
Of course, we’ll have a much clearer sense of the NFL’s organic growth next season, when all ratings comparisons will be of the apples-to-apples variety.
In the meantime, the Big Data + Panel renaissance seems to have had a negligible impact on non-sports programming, as the average primetime broadcast deliveries were flat at 3.3 million viewers per episode. That said, declines among the 18-49 set slowed to a year-to-year dip of 5.8%, which marks a notable improvement compared to the previous season’s drop (13.3%). All things being equal, it appears as if the new ratings currency helped offset the demo drain to at least some extent.
As the pay-TV industry cheers on the potential for a World Cup-related uptick in Q2 and Q3 business, the cable giants especially should be keeping on eye on what Charter Communications has been up to on the customer-retention front. The company reported a loss of 51,000 residential video customers in the first quarter, which counts as a massive upgrade from the 167,000 subs that bolted in the year-ago period. (Charter went so far as to post an exceedingly uncommon gain of 44,000 pay-TV homes during the fourth quarter of 2025, a result that prompted MoffettNathanson to declare that the operator’s “video business is single-handedly rolling back the clock.”)
Charter customers particularly seem to be compelled by the company’s reinvention of the old-school bundle, whereby it offers access to sports-heavy streaming services such as Peacock, ESPN Unlimited and Paramount + (all of which would cost $126 per month on an a la carte basis) as part of its “TV Select Plus” package. As the MN report notes, “There’s never a reason to churn because it’s all there for one price.”
While it remains to be seen how the Charter strategy will play out in the long run, the immediate results have been hard to quibble with. Just two years ago, the company’s pay-TV base was shrinking at nearly 10%; in the January-March quarter, however, the rate of decline was slashed to just 1.3%.