Cord-cutting is slowing, and bundling is why

The cord-cutting story has quietly changed shape. Pay-TV subscriber losses are decelerating, and the reason is the box, not the screen. Charter's losses fell from 80,000 to 21,000 subscribers year over year after it bundled ESPN Unlimited, Fox One, Paramount+, and Peacock into its pay-TV package, making traditional TV cheaper than cutting the cord and paying for the same streamers a la carte. Comcast and EchoStar also narrowed their losses. The streaming side of the same coin: 31% of cord-cutters sign up for a new streaming service within a month of cancelling pay TV, and the biggest winners are Paramount+ and Peacock premium tiers, which carry the live sports national broadcast programming people still want. Charter itself called it out in earnings: the deceleration was "driven by simplified pricing and packaging."

The crux

Cord-cutting is not over, but it is no longer a one-way valve from linear to streaming; bundling has made the pay-TV box a distribution channel for streamers, blurring what counts as cable versus streaming subscription.

Sell-side read

For publishers and broadcasters, the implication is that distribution is being re-aggregated by the pay-TV bundle, which concentrates audience reach back through a few gatekeepers and has knock-on effects for how streaming advertising inventory is packaged and sold.

Watch

next quarter's pay-TV losses, and whether the bundling effect accelerates as more streamers chase carriage in the cable bundle rather than going direct.