Subscriber Loss In Q3

The trends in Q3 has not been that great for US pay-TV providers, as they suffered a major loss of approximately half million subscribers during the period. And many experts are attributing the subscriber loss count to the boom of streaming services.

Research firm MoffettNathanson recently submitted a report, which revealed that the net subscriber loss suffered by pay-TV providers in Q3 was approximately same as last year. However, cable has managed to continue their steady improvements even during Q3. They have managed to control their losses to just 0.4 percentages and they have done extremely well since the year 2010.

On the other hand, Telco IPTV subscriptions declined from a positive 2.6% to an 11.7% loss in just a year. Reports indicate that DirecTV has managed to perform well when compared to their prime competitor, Dish Network. However, reports also stated that the migrations from AT&T’s U-Verse IPTV are one of the major reasons behind these results.

No One Watching TV

In their Q3 report, MoffettNathanson said that, “The transition of U-Verse customers to DirecTV at AT&T naturally makes satellite look better and the Telco category look worse than would otherwise be the case.” The firm also added that still “the share shifts here are breathtaking. Just two years ago, the Telcos were growing subscribers at 9.8%.”

In the over-the-top (OTT) category, AT&T had recently announced that they would launch their latest online steaming service, DirecTV Now, by the end of November. Hulu is also planning to launch their streaming service in the next year. Apart from that, no major new streaming services were launched or no major channel lineup changes were declared. Still many experts blame streaming services for the loss of pay TV subscribers.

“Perhaps predictably, then, trends were largely unchanged. With new household formation almost the same as last year as well, there simply aren’t a lot of big takeaways in this quarter’s data,” MoffettNathanson reported. “We would be remiss if we didn’t mention the coming post-election changeover in Washington.”