As many analysts had predicted, the rate of cord cutting is accelerating at Comcast Corporation. According to the company's latest earnings report, the company lost another 92,000 pay TV subscribers during the first quarter, a notable increase from the 42,000 subscriber net gain the company reported this time last year. Comcast's growing monopoly over broadband has helped insulate the company somewhat as frustrated DSL users fleeing telcos for faster speeds often tend to bundle cable TV when they switch to nab a better rate.
But with streaming competition soaring, that advantage isn't quite what it used to be.
Analysts predict that the rate of cord cutting at Comcast Corporation will more than double this year, as even more discounted streaming alternatives hit the market.
And it's not like Comcast hasn't been preparing for this natural evolution. On one end, the company has been trying to stall the rate of cord cutting by cozying up to Netflix, first by including Netflix in the company's X1 set top boxes, and more recently bundling Netflix into cable, phone and broadband packages if users are willing to sign a two year contract.
But Comcast's primary countermeasure involves making existing broadband services more expensive. The company has slowly but surely been imposing arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees to make sure the company recoups any potential TV revenue losses and makes cutting the cord more expensive for users. Such limits are little more than glorified price hikes, only made possible by the lack of real broadband competition (at speeds of 25 Mbps) across most of the company's markets.
Thanks to a growing array of telcos that simply refuse to seriously upgrade their networks (CenturyLink and Frontier have been particularly awful on this front), Comcast continues to add broadband subscribers at a faster rate than most of its competitors, adding another 370,000 broadband subscribers during the first quarter.