Parks Associates today reported carriage disputes can have a substantial impact on pay-TV subscribership, as 7% of pay-TV subscribers who lose a channel, roughly 2% of all subscribers, will switch providers when they drop a channel.
The new research Carriage Disputes: The Subscriber Perspective, based on multiple nationwide surveys of over 2,000 U.S. broadband households, examines the impact of carriage disputes, which have prompted pay-TV providers like DirecTV, Dish Network, and Time Warner to drop channels such as AMC, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and MTV as part of ongoing fee and licensing struggles between service and content providers.
Carriage disputes are becoming more common as content costs consume bigger percentages of APRU. While dropped channels do cause churn, 16% of those affected watched missing programs online, suggesting that the availability of episodes online does dampen the severity of channel loss for subscribers.
