Shifting consumer preferences will lead to more than 37 million households relying exclusively on broadband for video by 2022 S&P Global Market Intelligence. That figure is nearly double the number of broadband-only households today as consumers continue to shy away from multichannel video, the research firm added.
S&P Global Market Intelligence expects 38.4% of the combined residential cable and telco wireline broadband subscribers in 2022 to eschew legacy multichannel distribution and rely mostly on a combination of broadband and over-the-air broadcast signals for home video entertainment.
Broadband-Only Households
“A perfect storm of long-term trends including increase in streaming content suppliers, widespread utility-like status of broadband, and a demographic shift attributable to shrinking baby boomers and rising millennials, is yielding higher broadband-only home gains than initially anticipated, prompting a significant upward update for our projections,” said Tony Lenoir, senior research analyst, in a prepared statement.
Additional findings from the research firm’s broadband-only home outlook:
- Broadband-only homes, or households without a traditional multichannel video package but a subscription to wireline broadband, will rise at a 14.4% compound annual growth rate from 2017 to 2022.
- Broadband-only homes are set to take up 29.2% of U.S. occupied households by 2022. Kagan expects traditional multichannel penetration to be in the low 60% range at that time.
- Operators that offer video as well as broadband may be in an advantageous position. By 2020, cable will count more than 70 million broadband customers. The sector’s video subscriber count peaked at 67.1 million in 2001.