Sling TV ended the third quarter of 2025 with almost two million subscribers, an increase on the previous quarter, and bucking the subscriber loss trend the service has encountered over previous quarters. However, there was a notable change to the way Sling counts subscribers during the most recent quarter.
Key Takeaways
- Sling TV reported 1,995,000 subscribers in Q3 2025, reversing its recent trend of subscriber losses, but this isn’t as straight forward as it sounds.
- EchoStar introduced a new counting method recently to include non-recurring revenue sources like Sling Freestream and Passes by Sling.
- As a result, the third quarter’s 1,995,000 subscribers includes 159,000 subscribers additions and an additional 51,000 subscribers based on non-recurring video service accounts.
Earlier this year, Sling introduced its new Passes by Sling options. These allow consumers to sign up to the Sling Orange plan on either a day, weekend, or weekly basis, and are non-recurring subscriptions.
While not technically subscribers, the company does earn revenue from these customers, and has now made a change to the way it counts subscribers to account for their inclusion.
In our coverage of Sling’s third quarter earnings earlier today we noticed a discrepancy in the subscriber counts. Basically, while EchoStar reported quarterly additions of 159,000, our tracking of subscribers pointed to an increase of 210,000.
That’s a difference of around 51,000 subscribers and we can confirm that difference can be explained by the change in the way Sling TV subscribers are now calculated.
From August 2025, Sling has started dividing its total ‘Flexible Offerings’ revenue by the price of its lowest tier programming package. This number is then included in the service’s subscriber count.
According to EchoStar, the definition of its Flexible Offerings include those using Sling TV Freestream and Passes by Sling, as well as customers where revenue is generated from other non-recurring video service accounts.
In terms of the third quarter of 2025, this new way of calculating subscribers resulted in the addition of 51,000 subscribers, helping to explain the discrepancy we noted before.
In short, Sling added 159,000 subscribers during the most recent quarter and included an additional 51,000 subscribers on top of this in its quarterly earnings today to account for the additional non-recurring video service accounts.
All of which amounted to an overall total of 1,995,000 subscribers, including those paying monthly and those that paid for a short-term plan during the quarter.
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