The top 15 U.S. pay TV platforms lost more than 1.568 million users in the Q2, marking the sixth straight quarter in which the industry shed a million or more customers, according to figures released by Leichtman Research Group.
The losses were slightly more than the 1.530 million subscribers LRG tallied in the second quarter of 2019. But the attrition was better than the 2.067 million lost souls recorded in the first quarter.
The individual pay TV operators covered in LRG’s quarterly tallies mostly release their customer figures during earnings reports. But LRG includes a few interesting estimates. For example, AT&T said it lost nearly 900,000 million users in the second quarter across its “premium video” category, which includes legacy service U-verse TV, satellite TV operation DirecTV and new IP-delivered platform AT&T TV.
LRG estimates that 846,000 of those losses belonged to DirecTV, while U-verse slid another 40,000 customers to a base of only 3.4 million.
Updated 8/13/2020: LRG chief Bruce Leichtman emailed Next TV Thursday morning to tell us that AT&T TV numbers are included in the U-verse TV figure. He also noted that Hulu+ Live TV additions of 100,000 customers in Q2 came from Disney's recent earnings report.
