Advanced Television

DirecTV continues to lose subs

July 19, 2021

By Chris Forrester

AT&T is due to officially reveal its financials on July 22nd, but it is already apparent that subscriber numbers are not good.

AT&T, in an SEC filing, stated that its subscriber count for the combined DirecTV, AT&T TV and AT&T U-verse divisions totalled 15.412 million, which is a drop of 2.3 million year-on-year or 13 per cent (from 17.712 million) on Q2/2020.

If there was a glimpse of positive news it was that the Q2 quarterly drop was the lowest since Q4/2018. The organisation’s pay-TV subscriber net decline for the second quarter of 2021 was 473,000, an improvement of 47 per cent from the year-ago period, when the telco shed 887,000 subs.

All-important monthly churn ranges from Q2’s 1.87 per cent, and itself better than the 2.42 per cent churn a year previously. January 2020 saw DirectTV’s churn at 2.7 per cent. January 2021 churn was 2.23 per cent.

AT&T adds that New DirecTV, the business which combines the company’s pay-TV divisions, in fact lost fewer subscribers in Q2. AT&T sold a 30 per cent stake in New DirecTV to private equity firm TPG Capital (the former Texas Pacific Group).

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