Sling TV has seen a quarterly subscriber drop for the first time since the service launched. Sling TV is one of the most popular live TV streaming services in the US with more than 2 million subscribers. However questions will now be asked following the service’s first example of subscriber decline and at a time where other services continue to make gains.
Sling TV is one of the oldest live TV streaming services considering it launched back in early 2015. This allowed the brand to get an early foothold in the market before the market really took off. Since then, it has generally always been on the up with Sling TV constantly adding new subscribers. However, that changed in the final quarter of 2019.
Dish Network released its latest quarterly results today which confirmed that Sling TV had 2.59 million subscribers at the end of 2019. Back in November, Dish released its third-quarter results indicating the service had 2.69 million. The discrepancy shows Sling TV lost close to 100,000 subscribers in the final three months of 2019.
Sling TV pricing no longer enough?
Compared to the other live TV streaming services, the big play with Sling TV is the price as the cheapest package available costs just $30 per month. This is considerably less than the average making it a great option for cord cutters. This lower-than-usual price has been a major strength for Sling TV and one of the factors that has helped the service to continuously add new subscribers each quarter. Until now.
Besides AT&T TV NOW (which is consciously losing subscribers these days) and PlayStation Vue (which has now closed down completely), Sling TV’s subscriber drop is notable as it comes at a time when most other services continue to see increases. Hulu live TV is now understood to be over 3 million subscribers, while YouTube recently confirmed its TV service now has more than 2 million subscribers.
In spite of the subscriber drop, Sling TV has been hard at work adding new features in the past few months. The most recent of which was a new Spotlight feature that looks to highlight upcoming live sports events to avoid subscribers missing out on the action as it unfolds. This was following an expansion of its Sling Free experience to web browsers.
Source: Dish Network
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