AT&T said that it lost 473,000 premium video subscribers in the second quarter.
The cord-cutting was less than a year ago, the company said, adding that the churn rate for its DirecTV unit was down in the quarter.
According to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission sharing preliminary information AT&T was providing to investors as part of its plan to spin off DirecTV to TPG, the company had 15.4 million subscribers at the end of the second quarter, down 13% from a year ago.
Analysts and other observers will be eagerly looking for more companies to report second quarter subscriber numbers to determine the rate at which pay TV is losing business. AT&T will formally report earnings and other operations data next week.
DirecTV has been among the leaders in the pay TV world at losing subscribers.
Looking at premium video subscribers—including DirecTV, AT&T TV and U-Verse TV—the company added 492,000 gross subscribers in the quarter, up 2% from a year ago. In terms of net subscribers, it lost 473,000 customers. The loss was 47% better than a year ago when it lost 887,000 subscribers.
AT&T put DirecTV's churn rate at 1.87% and said that was an improvement of 22% from churn of 2.42% a year ago.
