Adding an estimated 600,000 customers in the third quarter, YouTube TV ended September with around 6.5 million customers, according to Leichtman Research Group’s quarterly tally of the top pay TV operators serving 96% of the U.S. market.
LRG’s user-base estimate for YouTube TV seems light to us — another research group, Antenna, just projected that the Alphabet/Google platform has around 7.3 million customers — but either way, it pushed the overall virtual MVPD category past a notable milestone.
With Hulu Plus Live TV, Sling TV and Fubo all adding customers in Q3, the vMVPD category now controls, for the first time, more than 20% of U.S. pay TV customers.
Google/Alphabet doesn't often break out numbers for its six-year-old YouTube TV service, but depending on whose tally you believe, the vMVPD may have already surpassed Dish satellite TV as America's fourth largest pay TV platform.
Many U.S. tier 2 and tier 3 cable operators have given up on offering their core broadband customer base unprofitable linear video and instead are directing these customers to YouTube TV under marketing partnership agreements.
Likewise, during its nearly two-week blackout of ESPN in early September, Charter Communications also directed its football-hungry subs to YouTube TV.
Meanwhile, LRG’s quarterly pay TV tally includes another key estimate, with DirecTV platforms said to have lost another 500,000 subscribers in Q3.
