Breitbart Reports: The pay-TV industry lost 1.6 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2024, reports Business Insider, adding that “there doesn’t seem to be any reason for those losses to stop.”

Pay TV is cable and satellite TV (CSTV). It also includes “digital alternatives,” like YouTube TV, where you stream the equivalent of CSTV — the same channel packages.

Those 1.6 million subscribers lost in the second quarter account for 6.9% of the industry’s base, and there’s no reason to think the slide is going to slow down at all, analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson write: “It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no longer any floor.”

As we’ve discussed here before, a few years ago there was a thought that digital pay-TV distributors like YouTube TV and Hulu Live would replace losses at conventional distributors, but that’s no longer true.

For context, in 2019, a mere five years ago, 90.4 million households subscribed to some form of CSTV.

That number is now down to about 68.76 million.

In six months, a staggering four million households have canceled their CSTV, and that is net losses with however many new sign-ups included.

In another five years, that number is projected to be below 60 million.

Compared to the second quarter of 2023, CSTV has lost seven percent of its customers.

Everyone thought — except me — that the CSTV bundle could move to streaming and make up for the conventional losses. What everyone didn’t understand, though, was the value of a streaming service compared to the giant ripoff that is CSTV.