Tuesday, August 15, 2017

One Time When Scale Apparently is a Negative

Scale matters in telecommunications and network-delivered content. But some forms of scale, namely the number of channels offered to consumers, seem to have negative impact. In other words, offering “too many” channels leads to much lower revenue per channel, as you would expect.

The relationship between market share and revenue per channel is less clear, if only because some smaller providers also offer the smallest channel lineups, while some larger suppliers offer the most channels.



Service Providers
Subscribers at
End of 1Q 2017
Cable Companies

Comcast
22,549,000
Charter
17,147,000
Altice*
3,500,000
Mediacom**
832,000
Cable ONE
307,187
Other major private company***
4,275,000
Total Top Cable
48,610,187

Satellite Services (DBS)

DIRECTV
21,012,000
DISH-DBS^
12,173,000
Total DBS
33,185,000

Phone Companies

Verizon FiOS
4,681,000
AT&T U-verse
4,048,000
Frontier^^
1,065,000
Total Top Phone
9,794,000

Internet-Delivered

Sling TV^
1,355,000
DIRECTV NOW^^^
375,000
Total Internet-Delivered
1,730,000

Total Top Providers
93,319,187


It also is possible to note that suppliers will smaller subscriber bases also tend to carry more channels, which, all things being equal, also lowers revenue per channel.

Nobody yet really knows how fixed wireless enabled by a 5G network will compare, in terms of deployment cost, with fiber to home costs, except to say virtually everyone expects that cost to be less than FTTH.


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