The coax bundle refuses to die, but it is bleeding in the millions, while the virtual bundles quietly soak up a fraction of the refugees and let the rest scatter into pure on-demand and free, ad-supported TV (FAST) channels.
Traditional cable / pay-TV snapshot (U.S., 2025)
| Operator / metric | 2025 video subs & trend | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Comcast (Xfinity video) | Lost 257,000 TV customers in Q3 2025 alone. | Fourth straight quarter of video losses; cord cutting plus streaming focus drag the legacy bundle. (Comcast Q3 2025 earnings) |
| Charter (Spectrum video) | 12.6M video customers as of Sept. 30, 2025; down 70,000 in Q3 2025 (vs. 294,000 lost a year earlier). | New pricing and inclusion of streaming apps slowed—but did not stop—video erosion. (Charter investor update) |
| Traditional pay TV overall | Lost ~6M subscribers in Q2 2025; roughly one-third of U.S. homes still have a traditional bundle. | Declines continue ~11% annually; vMVPD growth only partly offsets the loss. (Leichtman Research) |
vMVPD / streaming “cable” snapshot (U.S., 2025)
| Service | 2025 subscribers (approx.) | 2025 trend & positioning |
|---|---|---|
| YouTube TV | ~9.4M subs as of Q1 2025; topped 10M by Nov. 2025. | Largest vMVPD; NFL Sunday Ticket and aggressive sports positioning fuel growth. (YouTube disclosures) |
| Hulu + Live TV | ~4.4M subs as of late 2025; total Hulu (SVOD + Live) at 64.1M. | Slower growth than early years but still Disney’s go-to bundle around college football and multichannel packages. (Disney filings) |
| Fubo | 1.63M paid subs in North America (Q3 2025) with $369M revenue. | Smaller than the giants but still growing as a sports-centric vMVPD despite NBCU turbulence. (Fubo Q3 2025) |
| Sling TV | ~2.0M subs (Statista, early 2025). | Lower-priced “skinny” bundle; growth relatively flat. |
| vMVPD market overall | YouTube TV 9.4M, Hulu + Live TV 4.4M, Sling 2.0M, Fubo 1.5M. | vMVPDs gained ~2M subs in Q2 2025 even as traditional pay TV lost ~6M, underscoring the shift from coax to app-based “cable.” (Statista) |
Squint at the math and cable in 2025 is less a binary fight between coax and streaming and more a slow exchange of one billing system for another. Legacy bundles bleed millions of homes each year; vMVPDs pick up a fraction, and the rest of the country decides that Netflix + FAST + Sunday Ticket is all they actually needed.
