Sling TV ended the fourth quarter with 2.49 million subscribers, marking a slight decrease compared to the third quarter of 2021. Although an increase on the year before, the number suggests that Sling TV saw very little change in terms of its overall subscriber base. This is at a time when fuboTV has substantially increased its own subscriber base.
Sling TV has always been a service focused on affordability. While it has encountered its fair share of price increases over the years, Sling remains one of the cheapest ways to watch live TV without a traditional cable or satellite package. This lower price point has continued to be a selling point for the service, and especially at times when other live TV services have increased their already higher monthly subscription prices.
Dish Network released its fourth quarter and year-end 2021 financial results, confirming Sling TV ended the quarter and year with 2.486 million subscribers. The announcement also confirmed the company closed the quarter with 8.22 million Dish TV subscribers, bringing the total number of pay-TV subscribers for the fourth quarter to 10.71 million. This represents a slight decrease compared to the previous quarter where Dish reported 10.98 million pay-TV subscribers overall.
While Dish TV appeared to have lost subscribers between the third and fourth quarter, so did Sling TV. At the end of the third quarter, Dish reported Sling TV had reached 2.56 million subscribers, resulting in a drop of around 70,000 during the final quarter of the year. At the yearly level, Sling TV closed 2020 with 2.474 million subscribers. While this does represent an increase of around 12,000, it is a fairly minimal change compared to the year before.
For comparison, fuboTV ended 2020 with 547,880 subscribers and earlier this week reported that it had finished 2021 with roughly 1.13 million subscribers overall. While still significantly behind Sling TV, it does highlight the general direction fuboTV has been moving in and the general stagnation Sling TV appears to be experiencing. For reference, Hulu Live TV finished last year with around 4.3 million subscribers. YouTube TV tends not to provide regular updates on its subscriber numbers, but it is understood to also be providing live TV to more than four million.
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