Sling TV ended the third quarter of 2020 with 2.46 million subscribers. The live TV streaming service encountered more than one quarterly subscriber decline in 2020, making the third quarter results the first time this year that the number of Sling TV subscribers increased.
Sling TV is one of the oldest live TV streaming services around. As a result, it has managed to build up a healthy subscriber base over the years. Almost as importantly, it has managed to maintain its subscriber base during that time. This is while Hulu and YouTube TV have continuously gained subscribers, with both services now serving more than three million subscribers each.
Dish Network released its third quarter financial results, confirming the 2.46 million Sling TV subscribers. Along with the 8.96 million Dish TV subscribers, Dish closed out the third quarter with 11.42 million pay-TV subscribers, representing an increase of 116,000 in the third quarter overall.
Sling TV’s turbulent 2020
While the number of Hulu Live and YouTube TV subscribers seems to continually be increasing, Sling TV’s subscriber base has been more up and down of late. Sling TV ended 2019 with 2.59 million subscribers. That number slipped to 2.31 million at the end of the first quarter of this year, and dropped down to 2.25 million at the end of the second quarter of 2020.
These back to back subscriber drops came at a time when other streaming services were seeing clear increases in the number of subscribers and the hours of usage, due to the stay-at-home orders that were in place.
After two successful quarterly subscriber drops in 2020, the third quarter saw Sling TV on the rise again with an increase of around 200,000 subscribers over the previous quarter. However, in spite of the third quarter increase, the number of Sling TV subscribers is still down, compared to how Sling TV started 2020.
With one more quarter left of this year to go, Sling TV will need to report a similar increase in the fourth quarter to close out 2020 with more subscribers than it did in 2019.
Source: Dish Network
