The media industry may be in for a rude awakening. Television companies have been trying to reassure investors lately that the modest decline in pay-TV subscribers they’ve seen over the past year will continue at the same manageable pace.

But new data out Thursday from eMarketer shows that cord-cutting is accelerating, driven by a rapidly expanding panoply of digital video services.

The number of pay-TV households will fall at an accelerating rate for at least the next four years, reaching a 1.4% decline in 2019, eMarketer estimates. By that year, eMarketer estimates that almost 23% of U.S. households won’t pay for traditional TV. Photo: The Wall Street Journal Overall, the total number of households that don't subscribe to pay-TV—a combination of cord-cutters and the far more common “cord-nevers” who had never signed up in the first place—will hit 20.8 million by the end of 2015, according to eMarketer, or about 17% of U.S. households. “This year, the number of digital video services expanded at a faster pace than ever before,” said eMarketer’s senior analyst Paul Verna in a statement. “In addition to standalone offerings from the likes of HBO, there are new digital bundles that include many of the channels consumers could only have received with cable and satellite subscriptions in the past. This widespread availability of digital content makes cord-cutting a viable option for a growing segment of the viewing population.” Write to Keach Hagey at keach.hagey@wsj.com

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