After eight years of declines, MoffettNathanson's new "Cord Cutting Monitor" for Q3 2025 shows that pay TV subscribers to linear TV packages rose by 303,000, the first reported rise in MVPD and vMVPD sub counts since 2017.
The last time sub counts rose was in Q4, 2017, when they increased by 318,000, data from MoffettNathanson shows. The slight increase in Q3 2025 is a notable turnaround from the 2,455,000 pay TV sub losses in Q1 2025 and 1,054,000 in Q2 2025.
The analysts stressed that the increase was likely seasonal as sub counts traditionally improve at the start of the football season.
While traditional pay TV operators like Comcast and Charter continued to show declines and the increases came from vMVPDs like YouTube TV, MoffettNathanson offered more encouraging news for the pay TV sector with data showing that the rate of decline continued to slow.
“The rate of decline for traditional distributors improved for the fifth straight quarter,” the report stated. “While the rate of decline is still scary-high, it is unmistakably moderating. At Comcast, the trend has been improving for eight straight quarters; there, the rate of decline was the “slowest” – although no one would actually call it “slow” – since 2022. Even DirecTV and EchoStar have shown at least a little improvement. By far the biggest improvement, however – not just for traditional distribution but for the whole video industry – has come at Charter.”
The report also noted that “the vMVPDs are still growing” but “also more slowly.” The vMVPD category “is growing at a 4.6% annual rate. That’s unchanged versus each of the two prior quarters… even though it remains the slowest growth rate since the category was created,” the report said.
