While the US cable industry continues to bleed subscribers, telcos Verizon and AT&T have been on the receiving end – adding new pay TV customers. This morning Verizon announced that it had added 192,000 new FiOS TV customers, swelling its ranks to 3.7 million. Yesterday AT&T stated that it had added 218,000 customers to its U-verse TV service for a total of 3.2 million TV subscribers. For those keeping score, that is over a 6% increase for the telco/IPTV sector within one quarter.

Verizon and AT&T do not appear to be letting off of the accelerator anytime soon. In fact, AT&T plans to more specifically leverage its wireless subscriber base by promoting special TV subscription offers for AT&T Wireless customers.

Importantly, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and many other MSOs are not sitting still. They continue to roll out new value-added services to retain customers, but are losing more analog cable subscribers than they are gaining in digital cable subscribers.

Brett Sappington, Senior Analyst
Worldwide TV and Broadband Services