Broadband-only households in the US are set to grow from 19 million in 2017 to 37.2 million by 2022, according to estimates from Kagan, a media research group within S&P Global Market Intelligence. Tony Lenoir, Senior Kagan Research Analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said:
“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”.
Kagan expects 38.4% of the combined residential cable and telco wireline broadband subscribers in 2022 to eschew legacy multi-channel distribution and rely mostly on a combination of broadband and over-the-air broadcast signals for home video entertainment. The company expects broadband-only homes, or households without a traditional multi-channel video package but a subscription to wireline broadband, to rise at a CAGR of 14.4% from 2017 to 2022.
Broadband-only homes are set to take up 29.2% of US occupied households by 2022. Kagan expects traditional multi-channel 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.
