DirecTV is estimated to have lost around 400,000 subscribers during the second quarter of 2023. This estimated drop relates to the combined total of DirecTV, DirecTV Stream, and U-verse subscribers.
Unlike many other live TV streaming services, DirecTV doesn’t provide regular updates on its subscriber base. We regularly track all of the latest subscriber changes and the last time numbers for DirecTV Stream were released was at the start of 2021, prior to the DirecTV spinoff.
Since then, the industry has had to rely on third-party estimations for DirecTV, and the latest comes from Leichtman Research Group. According to this latest data, DirecTV ended the second quarter of 2023 with 12,350,000 total subscribers, down 400,000 from the previous quarter.
If the figure is even remotely accurate, then it looks like it was a bad quarter for DirecTV’s video services. However, it wasn’t just DirecTV that’s understood to have seen losses during the second quarter.
According to the same report, the “top vMVPDs” (excluding DirecTV Stream which is factored into DirecTV’s total) lost a total of 115,000 subscribers in Q2 2023. This category does include YouTube TV, which was apparently the only vMVPD to not lose subscribers during the quarter.
Similar to DirecTV, YouTube also doesn’t provide regular updates on subscribers, so the increase of 200,000 during the second quarter is another estimate provided by Leichtman.
Either way, and YouTube TV aside, the report suggests that the second quarter of 2023 was not a great quarter for live TV streaming services in general.
But that was already known.
Earlier this month, Disney released its quarter results confirming the number of Hulu Live TV subscribers had dropped to 4.3 million, down 100,000 on the previous quarter. Likewise, Dish Network confirmed Sling TV subscribers dropped to 2 million (down 100,000) and Fubo confirmed its North American subscriber base dropped to 1.167 million (down 118,000).
All of which does make clear that the second quarter wasn’t the best for live TV streaming. That said, it is worth noting that the second quarter of 2022 wasn’t much different. While the losses weren’t quite as bad, Leichtman reports that the same ‘top vMVPDs’ collectively lost around 65,000 subscribers in Q2 2022.
The third quarter of the year is often when we start to see an uptick in live TV subscriptions, thanks in part to the return of football, so the next round of subscriber numbers should help to paint a better picture of how the live TV streaming market is unfolding in 2023.
