Cable subscribers drop to 1980s levels

A recent report says that the number of cable TV subscribers in the USA has dropped to levels not seen since the 1980s.

Last week, Luke Bouma of Cord Cutters News posted that the most recent data shows that only 34 million people subscribe to cable TV in the USA.

According to the study, only 34 million Americans subscribe to cable TV in the third quarter of 2023. That number has not been that low since 1984.

It is a dramatic fall from the peak subscriber numbers of 67 million in 2002 before satellite, TelCos, and streaming started to chip away at the cable TV subscriber base.

Cable TV is not alone in this drop in subscribers. Satellite services, like DIRECTV and DISH, have seen subscriber numbers drop from a peak of 24 million in 2014 to 15 million at the end of the third quarter 2023.

Cable TV has lost 33 million subscribers since its peak. Satellite TV companies have lost 9 million American subscribers. Since the peak of both services, they have lost a combined 42 million subscribers.

That is a huge drop. I'm included, of course, but my dropping of cable was in 2011. More and more have dropped cable in the years since, and cable is now back to levels not seen in nearly 40 years.

If you still subscribe to cable, it may be time to ask yourself why. I've know people that became streamers but would not drop cable. Perhaps the familiarity was a security blanket. I don't really know, but that seem to be the case for those streamers I knew that kept cable.

There's not a lot you can watch on cable that you can't watch by other means. For me, there is nothing that I can't get some other way. I don't need cable TV. I haven't for years.

My Streaming Life has been cable free for 13 years. I dropped cable on January 11, 2011. It's now January 2024. I don't miss it, not one bit.