There’s no question that cord cutting is happening. Some industry executives expect the pay-TV universe to drop from its current position of 92 million homes to something a lot closer to 50 million over the next several years.
But something interesting happened in Nielsen’s November report on pay-TV distribution.
While the total number of multichannel homes dropped slightly in the past year (from 92.894 million homes in November 2019 to 91.981 million this month), distribution for most sports networks increased slightly.
Take ESPN, for example. In November 2019, it was in 83.314 million homes. This month, it’s in 83.47 million homes. That 0.2% year-over-year increase may not seem like much. But in this era of cord cutting and dropping distribution numbers, any increase can be considered a surprise.
The other ESPN channels tell the same story: ESPN2 grew from 83.229 million homes to 83.44 million and ESPNU grew from 60.975 million homes to 61.426 million.
Other sports nets saw similar growth, like FS1 (from 80.238 million to 80.493 million), Golf Channel (from 68.014 million to 68.726 million) and NBCSN (80.494 million to 80.575 million).
Even some of the league-owned channels showed increases, like NBA TV (from 42.504 million to 49.517 million) and NFL Network (from 57.784 million to 58.232 million). MLB Network was one of the few sports channels to see a decrease: 55.406 million to 54.292 million.
Why are sports networks showing increases when other networks are down? There could be dozens of reasons, but one source speculated that the modest increases come from streaming services, like YouTube TV or Hulu, which carry sports channels.
