By the end of next year, fewer than half of U.S. homes will have a traditional pay-TV subscription, reported eMarketer Tuesday, forecasting a 4.8% decline from 2022 to 65.1 million. In February 2022, 52.4% of homes, 68.5 million, had a traditional pay-TV account. Subscriptions will steadily decline through 2026, when the number of pay-TV households will fall to 57.2 million, 42.4% of homes, it said. From 2016 to 2021, pay TV lost more than 50 million adult viewers, 25.5 million households, with the steepest drop in 2020 at 7.7%, the report said. Many cord-cutters will turn to virtual MVPD services such as Hulu+Live TV and YouTube TV; the segment is expected to grow 7.6% this year vs. 2021, to 11.4% of all U.S. households, eMarketer said. Though virtual MVPDs will benefit from traditional pay-TV subscriber losses, their growth won’t be enough to offset the decline in cable, satellite TV and fiber TV customers, it said. This year, 63.2% of all households will have either traditional pay TV or a VMVPD service, but the percentage is expected to drop to 54.8% in 2026. Deals for live sports programming and ad-supported tiers of TV services are creating an “increasingly enticing environment for disgruntled pay TV households to finally cut the cord,” it said.

Cox will double the download speed of its low-cost ConnectAssist and Connect2Compete broadband programs to 100 Mbps at month's end, it said Wednesday. The upgrade comes at no additional cost, it said. It said it's expanding eligibility for the low-cost broadband to meet Affordable Connectivity Program criteria.

Cable operators have a May 18 deadline for submitting such pricing data as for basic service and equipment, with that data to be used in the biennial communications marketplace report to Congress, per an FCC Office of Engineering and Technology order Tuesday (docket 92-266). The cable operators required to report the data are being selected in a random sample, the agency said.

Mediacom is boosting download speeds for a variety of its Xtream internet tiers, including its Conect2Compete low-cost offering doubling to 100 Mbps, at no additional cost, it said Monday.

Comcast Advertising announced the AudienceXpress brand, which allows U.S. advertisers to buy TV advertising on an audience basis across broadcast, cable, digital and connected TV. Comcast's FreeWheel team will come under the AudienceXpress brand, said the company. The offering includes the ability to measure and report on campaigns in “near real time”; integration with major MVPDs; use of aggregated Comcast viewership data, along with first- and third-party data; and incremental reach and attribution.

Charter Communications and Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey (D) asked U.S. District Judge Jon Levy of Portland to grant judgment in the state's favor in Charter's challenge of the state's cable TV rate prorating law, per a proposed final judgment Thursday (docket 1:20-cv-00168). The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in January reversed Levy's finding that the Cable Act preempted the state law (see 2201040072).

Charter Communciations' "all-in" price claims for its Spectrum Mobile service are supported, but it should drop its disparaging claim that AT&T deceives consumers about its wireless service pricing, the Better Business Bureau's National Advertising Division (NAD) said Tuesday. AT&T challenged the Charter TV ad. NAD said Charter indicated it would comply with the recommendations, though it disagreed with some of the findings. Charter didn't comment.

Cable ISPs dissuading consumers from using their own equipment such as modems, often by not troubleshooting subscribers' service disruptions when those modems are used, results in a de facto requirement that consumers rent equipment they would prefer to own, Consumer Reports (CR) said in docket 21-501 Tuesday. Reply comments were due Monday on Television Viewer Protection Act implementation. The cable industry said results of TVPA implementation were mixed (see 2202040055). CR said the FCC should investigate such modem rental tactics. It said the law's requirement that providers inform customers of the total price with all fees included "is a step towards greater transparency," and helps people understand the service's true cost rather than advertised rates, which often don't include taxes, surcharges and fees. Nexstar disputed ACA Connects claims that it and the National Cable TV Cooperative didn't reach terms on a retransmission consent agreement because the broadcaster wanted to limit the size of NCTC members participating in any agreement. ACA didn't comment.

Following sale last year of five of its 19 markets (see 2111010005) and using proceeds to pay down debt, WideOpenWest now is focused on growth and expanding its footprint, Chief Financial Officer John Rego said in a Raymond James investor conference Monday. He said it “would be really difficult” to sell more markets. He said beyond the previously announced expansions into Seminole and Orange counties in Florida (see 2202240012), WOW will announce this year at least one other "greenfield" expansion into an area where it doesn't currently operate. He said WOW's growth focus is on such greenfield overbuilding, as well as edge-outs of its network into adjacent territory and more commercial enterprise services. WOW used to spend $30 million to $40 million a year on edging out, but that nosedived to $5 million during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said. Most new residential connections are taking 500 Mbps or higher, he said. Numerous customers moved to higher speed tiers during the pandemic, and it isn't anticipated many will level back down as they start returning to the office, he said. WOW's partnership with Reach Mobile on offering WOW-branded mobile service (see 2202220045) is a way of giving WOW a new product bundle for reducing churn as well as a means of testing mobile "to see if it's something we want to go deeper into," Rego said.

Both Charter Communications and music labels suing it for contributory copyright infringement clearly lost, deleted or otherwise didn't preserve data and documents relevant to the case, said U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Hegarty. Citing that "practical equilibrium," Hegarty in a recommendation Monday (docket 19-cv-00874) said Charter should be precluded from disputing the "numerosity of the infringement notices" during the upcoming trial, and the plaintiffs should be allowed to put on evidence that the lost Charter Abuse Tracking System data hinders their ability to how the revenue earned from repeat copyright infringers. He said Charter should be allowed to introduce evidence of missing forensic information for purposes of contesting how much the jury should accept the labels' proof of copyright infringement by Charter customers.