If there’s never any ideal timeframe through which to assess the ongoing death-spiral that is the traditional pay-TV bundle, the first quarter of every year is demonstrably the least flattering for the sector. It’s no coincidence that subscribers are more likely to end their commitments during the three-month period when the college football and NFL seasons come to an end, so much so that the last time operators managed to get through a Q1 without losing customers was in 2010.
For what it’s worth, the Q1 gain of 16 years ago was nominal (+1.5%), and it’s been all downhill since. But it’s not just the cable/satellite/telco-TV ops that get roughed up every year, as the virtual MVPDs also take a kicking when all the football goes away; per MoffettNathanson analysis, services like YouTube TV, Sling TV and Hulu/Fubo saw a record 948,000 customers step away during the first quarter of 2026—nearly as many defections as were recorded by the trad bundlers (-1.09 million).
All told, the bundled-TV sub count ended up at 40.9 million subs, which marked a 9.7% drop compared to the year-ago 45.3 million tallied by MoffettNathanson, and a 20.3% drop versus Q1 of 2024. Pull back a bit and the losses are even more vertiginous, as major providers such as Comcast and DirecTV have seen nearly half (48.7%) of their video customers take flight since the COVID-19 pandemic began disrupting day-to-day life in March 2020. Since then, 38.8 million U.S. households have ditched the bundle, a figure that represents a staggering 30.8% of all domestic TV homes.
