37.2 million U.S. households to go broadband-only by 2022

37.2 million Households Projected to go Broadband-only by 2022, S&P Global Market Intelligence projects

MONTEREY, Calif. — Broadband-only households are set to grow from 19.0 million in 2017 to 37.2 million by 2022, according to estimates from Kagan, a media research group within S&P Global Market Intelligence.

“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,” said Tony Lenoir, Senior Kagan Research Analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Kagan expects 38.4% of the combined residential cable and telco wireline broadband subscribers in 2022 to eschew legacy multichannel distribution and rely mostly on a combination of broadband and over-the-air broadcast signals for home video entertainment.

Additional takeaways from Kagan’s broadband-only home outlook:

• Kagan expects broadband-only homes, or households without a traditional multichannel video package but a subscription to wireline broadband, to rise at a 14.4% compound annual growth rate from 2017 to 2022.
• Broadband-only homes are set to take up 29.2% of U.S. occupied households by 2022. Kagan expects traditional multichannel 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.