Survey: 25% of Homes Shun Traditional Pay TV

A quarter of U.S. TV households have neither a cable nor satellite subscription, with younger people even more likely than the general population to be over-the-air-only viewers, market research firm GfK said.

That comes from GfK's 2016 Ownership and Trend Report, which shows that 17% of U.S. TV households rely on broadcast service, up from 15% in 2015, while another 6% rely on Internet video services including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu or YouTube and do not watch either broadcast or traditional pay TV, up from 4% in 2015.

Interestingly, the younger demo (18-34) is most likely to opt for broadcast versus pay TV, with 22% saying they are using over-the-air reception versus an MVPD and 13% saying they were using their TV sets to view Internet video.

“The fact that a statistically significant increase in broadcast-only reception occurred over just one year may be further proof that the cord-cutting/cord-never phenomenon is accelerating,” sayid David Tice, SVP in GfK’s Media & Entertainment practice. “If you include homes that have no TVs at all – about 3% of all households – then less than three quarters (73%) of U.S. homes continue to have pay TV service, with the attendant implications for all stakeholders – not just the pay TV services themselves, but also networks, content providers and advertisers.”

The study, a part of GfK’s The Home Technology Monitor reports, was conducted among 3,009 households.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.