American Customer Satisfaction Index: customer satisfaction of streaming video services is 75% on average, far better than cable, satellite, telco TV rivals
U.S. cable and satellite TV sector falls to 11-year low on ACSI's index — This won't come as a huge shock …
Context & Ripple Effects
The ACSI's 2018 read lands mid-cord-cutting: streaming video scores 75% on customer satisfaction while the U.S. cable and satellite sector hits an 11-year low on the same index. That satisfaction gap is the demand-side mirror of what the supply data already showed — streaming subscriptions surpassed cable globally in 2018, and pure-play services like Sling TV and DirecTV Now were reaching a fast-growing slice of Wi-Fi households.
What makes this score worth tracking is how it foreshadowed the next five years: by July 2022 Nielsen measured streaming taking the largest share of US TV viewing for the first time, and by Q1 2023 MoffettNathanson had pay TV penetration at its lowest since 1992. The 2018 satisfaction gap was an early leading indicator of that migration.
First-order effects
- Cable, satellite and telco TV providers are left defending a product customers rate at an 11-year low while streaming rivals hold a 75% satisfaction score — pushing them toward discounting and bundle retention offers rather than quality competition.
Second-order effects
- Pay-TV distributors respond by launching their own streaming products — the vMVPD wave behind Sling TV and DirecTV Now's growth — effectively competing against their own legacy bundles and accelerating cannibalization of the cable base.
Third-order effects
- As households stack multiple streamers — averaging three per subscriber by 2019, with nearly half reporting subscription fatigue — the industry's problem inverts from one dissatisfied monopoly provider to fragmentation and churn across many satisfied ones, setting up the consolidation and ad-tier era that followed.
The trend: Customer satisfaction and viewing share are migrating together from bundled pay TV to streaming services, with pay-TV penetration declining toward structural lows.