Moody’s assistant vice president and analyst Karen Berckmann and senior vice president Neil Begley estimated that revenue and cash flow will rise about three percent in 2012, fueled mainly by broadband and business services, in large part because video services are saturated and under assault by telcos and satellite providers.
Moody’s predicts that cable penetration of the video market will slip to 41 percent in 2012, down from 43 percent today and 50 percent five years ago. A decade ago, cable routinely had penetration of 70 percent.
Comcast, which had about $1.3 billion in business services revenue during the first nine months of the year, to add more than $500 million in new commercial revenue in 2012. Cable forecast for 2012
Moody’s also came up with an new metric, the Triple-Play Equivalent (TPE) penetration rate, to track the acceptance of the industry’s three primary residential products, video, high speed data and voice. TPE growth, according to Moody’s has slowed to a trickle since 2009.
“We believe it will flatline in 2011 and 2012 at 32.5 percent for the sector given the continuing video subscriber losses and deceleration of high-speed-data and voice subscriber additions, which is not healthy news for some of the industry players suffering the most,” Begley says.
The TPE varies widely between industry players, with Cox Communications and Cablevision Systems showing TPE rates of over 40 percent, while Charter Communications and Mediacom Communications have rates of 27 percent.
