DIRECTV lost a net of 188,000 subscribers in the first quarter while AT&T’s U-Verse gained a net of 1,000 in the time period, AT&T announced today.
The telco also reported that its live streaming service, DIRECTV Now, added a net of 312,000 subscribers in the first quarter, bringing its total at first quarter’s end to nearly 1.5 million.
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Thanks to DIRECTV Now, AT&T posted a net gain of 125,000 video subscribers from January to the end of March.
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However, despite the overall positive result, AT&T has yet to find a solution to the continuing decline of video subscribers for DIRECTV.
DIRECTV lost a net of 147,000 subscribers in the fourth quarter. U-verse has experienced far greater losses in previous quarters although it added a net of 1,000 in the first quarter.
The telco blamed “heightened competition in linear pay-TV markets and…over-the-top
services” for the loss in satellite TV subs.
AT&T finished the first quarter with 25.4 million video subscribers.
— Phillip Swann
More streaming subscribers = more meltdown outages as high target live events add hundreds of thousands of additional stream requests that their syustsm just can’t handle. Kudos to TV Answerman for reporting these outages as they occur! Most of tech media folks do nothing but say great things about vMVPDs.