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AT&T Loses Record Number of Traditional TV Subscribers In Q2, Drops 156,000 DirecTV Satellite Customers (variety.com)
According to Variety, AT&T's pay-TV business has lost a record 351,000 traditional video customers in the second quarter, with the internet-delivered DirecTV Now service failing to fully offset the losses. From the report: In Q2, historically a seasonally weak period for the pay-TV business, DirecTV's U.S. satellite division lost 156,000 customers sequentially, dropping to 20.86 million, compared with a gain of 342,000 in the year-earlier quarter. AT&T's U-verse lost 195,000 subs in the quarter, which was actually an improvement over the 391,000 it lost in Q2 of 2016. AT&T touted that it gained 152,000 DirecTV Now customers in Q2, after adding just 72,000 in the first quarter of 2017. Overall, it had signed up 491,000 DirecTV Now subs as of the end of June, after the OTT service launched seven months ago.
I'm about to do the same to Comcast.. I'll just keep their internet.
Honestly, the only things I watch on "TV" (and these are DVR'd, due to this and that are.. The Amazing World of Gumball, Mighty Magiswords, Formula One racing, the odd thing on Science, and CNN's The "insert decade here"...
I'm *this* close to doing it.. to cutting the cord. Why haven't I done so yet? Dunno.. inertia? Nostalgia? Certainly nothing *rational* that I can think of..
Sorry, network / cable guys.. TV lost. It has become irrelevant.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
I swore I'd never give them another penny so long as I lived, then they went and bought DirecTV before my contract was over. Once it's done I'm out, never again. Those cock suckers can rot.
Comcast: 2014 worst company in America
Get rid of net neutrality ASAP so Netflix can be throttled out of existence so expensive tiers I don't want can be forced upon me!!
Anything else is Communism and Obama had something to do with it. We don't want to end up like Venezuela so let's give up some rights to the big corporations now before it's too late who have our best interests at heart
http://saveie6.com/
I dropped DirectTV years ago when I used to look at my channel guide on Saturday morning and see page after page of infomercials. And that was after setting up my favorites list which was maybe a third of the channels I was paying for.
Even when a program I liked was playing, the commercial breaks seemed to get longer and longer, and the commercials scummier and scummier. Boner pills. Restless leg syndrome. Reversible mortgages. Snake oil, junk food, and scams.
People are sick and tired of traditional cable systems. They don't want to pay for channels they don't watch. They're tired of the commercials. And they're increasingly spoiled with on-demand programming.
Your business model is dying. The sooner you become an IPTV on-demand gateway for content distributors, the better. Otherwise, the Roku boxes of the world will do it for you.
If it wasn't for live golf, NFL, college football, college basketball, tennis... it's easy to cut the cord. But most of those (golf majors and some tennis as outliers) you have nothing. As soon as I can ppv on the internet for the broncos or UK football / basketball, I'm out. Until then, I'm locked in
My cable company Cox (Cocks for real) decided to put a 1 TB data cap with $10 per 50 gigs over. With DTVNow, Netflix, games, etc. I'm up to 1.5TB some months so they want me to pay $79 a month for 50 meg down service + over $100 for overage fees. I'm about to move so now I'm back to DVR boxes and cable since it's the same price to get 3 boxes, cable, and 100 meg internet for the next year as I'm paying now for 50 meg and DTVNow. So the damn cable company figured out how to get me back on cable.
I was trying to watch some of the archived shows that are available with my DirecTV Now account. Their 72-hour and on-demand playback features have been getting a back seat, and are still very unreliable.
Eventually I gave up and just went to a pirate site to watch the shows. WOW. The pirated shows happen to be commercial-free. An episode of a 30 minute sitcom is about 22 minutes. So 8 minutes - more than 25% of the playtime - is commercials. Some episodes are only about 20 minutes long, meaning 33% of the playtime is commercials.
I didn't remember there being this many commercials when I was a kid (I cut way back on my TV watching after high school). Sure enough, commercial time was less than 20% in the 1970s and 1980s. I may just continue to watch the shows on pirate sites. I've already paid for the licensing rights to view the shows, and the service I paid for is failing to deliver them. So by my reckoning it's not really piracy; I'm just doing what I have to to get what I paid for. If it happens to be commercial-free, so be it.
Your business model is dying. The sooner you become an IPTV on-demand gateway for content distributors, the better. Otherwise, the Roku boxes of the world will do it for you.
Well they could, but what value would they add? Of course the streaming platform has to actually work, but other than that it's not music where you have playlists and sharing and artists hoping to be discovered on Spotify. If I want to see a 30+ minute show I can be arsed to log in to whatever service has it, whether it's Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, HBO or their own portal. The production companies and movie studios are no small fish either, they're perfectly capable of doing it on their own. There's not much money in being the middleman if you got plenty competition.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I swear their telemarketers called our house at least 50 times the past year. They use a robo-dialer, and if somebody answers, immediately switch to a pooled human (no water jokes, please). I did Trump impressions to fuck with them.
Table-ized A.I.
and i quit after the first month, what DirecTV dont tell you is over half the channels are spam channels nothing but home shopping channels trying to sell you crap you dont need, i dont want to wade through that crap to find something to watch, and DirecTV tried to get me to pay for a whole year and i called my credit card company and told them my credit card got stolen and to cancel that card and send me a new card with a new number cutting DirecTV off i refuse to pay for a whole year of shitty service from a bunch of spammers disguised as a satellite TV company, Fuck DirecTV i hope they go bankrupt and out of business
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Comcast makes it cheaper to retain a cable package then *just* get Internet from them.
Not surprised by this at all. I've been a long time customer and I currently have Uverse, so they provide my TV and internet. I'm not really happy with what I'm paying, although I do like the TV channels I get and the internet is plenty fast for my needs. So some months ago I talked to them and told them that they had to get my rates down or I would leave and go to Comcast, my only other choice where I live. AT&T told me that I had to move over to DirecTV to save any money, but they offered me a pretty good savings if I would switch and I'd get equivalent channels. I warned them that I live in a heavily wooded area with very high trees. "Don't worry. We have plenty of customers like you." Service guy comes out. Says he can't get a good signal anywhere. No DirecTV for me. No discount either. Now I want to be clear that I told AT&T if they didn't drop my rates that I was leaving. They really don't care. It makes no sense, but they are running their business where they would rather lose existing customers completely than give them a discount.
So I contacted Comcast. I can get the exact same TV channels or close enough and maybe slightly faster internet (not really a big deal to me - again, current internet is fast enough for my needs) but at exactly what I'm paying AT&T. Oh - you can't actually talk to anybody at Comcast. You have to use a chat window. So Comcast drone says "What do you think of that price? Isn't that great?" and I said "Not really." and disconnected them. I'm getting to the point where I may give AT&T one last chance to keep me, which I expect to fail, and then I'll just go to Comcast and pay exactly the same as I'm paying now or I'll just cut the cord altogether. Not sure which yet. But it is very clear to me that AT&T doesn't value my business at all and I'm not willing to stay there much longer without a discount.
I get that they might have 156k subscribers that unsubscribed, but how can it be a net loss if over 200k people subscribed?
Isn't the real news here "Boohoo, we didn't sucker as many people into our crap this quarter"?
Back when Charter decided to almost double my monthly cable cost I told them to go pound sand and went with the only other option in my area: AT&T U-Verse. They told me that not only was it available in my area, but it would be significantly cheaper (if a little slower) so I said that sounded fine. First they send the guy out to hook me up and tell me that whoever laid the main cable trunk did it wrong and they would have to come back another time to hook me up, they never did. I called AT&T and they apologized and said they'd send a guy out. The second guy said that there was no way I could get AT&T at my house and the guys are corporate were smoking something. At this point I was more than a little pissed off since I had been without any sort of internet for almost a week so I called back to just cancel the whole damn thing when they absolutely 100% promised me that not only could I get AT&T at my location but that someone would show up promptly to hook me up. No one ever came. I ended up going back to Charter and getting a semi-decent deal where I only get 10 'non-basic' channels for a really low rate, but since I only watch about 10 non-basic channels it's not a big deal. The cost ends up being slightly cheaper than cord cutting and a lot more convenient.
A salesman dropped by yesterday saying there were extending fiber in my area, and while it was competitive price/performance to Spectrum/TW Cable it was a lot more for a lot less compared to WOW which we've been using so no sale... I had been excited thinking they'd be offering gigabit but it was just 25 megabit when the local cable co's are starting baseline offers at 100 these days.
Plus there are the opening and closing Credits making the actual program about 15 minutes long
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
AT&T does a lot of slamming as part of their normal business model. A friend of mine was constantly being "renewed" for services she never signed up for in the first place.
AT&T was charging her for Direct TV also, but she hasn't had a TV for 10 years.
I quit Directv after only 7 months - their 'standard professional install' did not document their behavior of leaving the two dishes (standard and international) on bricks on the ground for 7 months. They moved during winter and refused to come out to complete the install. Upon cancelling they attempted to charge me full termination rate until I forced them to consider the install as being part of the contract - standard professional install != on bricks on ground. I read through the contractors instructions for install and that was not a option. But even with that they still charged me $60 for the termination - less than half the remaining amount - I went with this instead of wasting time with arbitration. Funny - they can charge me for an incomplete install but supposedly I have to be held to a contract that was not fulfilled by their end!
This is what is keeping me on DirecTV. Most of the major networks are blacked out on streaming options in my area since I'm close to DC, so no go there. Granted, when we finally get the option to pick and choose channels and sports (that I care about) to stream, I'm sure the cost will be comparable (or much more). Either way, someone is getting my money. I just make sure to call once a year and threaten to switch to FIOS TV. That keeps costs in check somewhat.
I wonder if any of the AT&T executives have even tried the fire stick. I watched game of thrones on a fucking playstation the other night.
The only problem putting the nail into the coffin is that there are still rural areas that aren't adequately internet serviced a real paradox for a company like AT&T.
I've been a cord cutter for so long (about 8 years now) that the idea of subscribing to traditional cable/satellite TV seems so archaic and such a massive waste of money to me now. It always feels weird to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV the old fashioned way. To me, cable/satellite is the TV equivalent of a flip phone.
I think this has less to do with people paying for and watching streaming services than it does at the ever-increasing fees for DirecTV. I can't remember the last time my bill was $50 a month. Get ready for ISPs to regularly increase their rates once they have a dominant position in the market.
I have DirectTV, and about the only reason is that my mother watches WAY more channels that I do. If it were me I'd either cut down to the bare package or get rid of it entirely.
I've love an ala carte system but they won't resort to that until they've lost more subscribers--and then they'll try to make it up with charges.
Most annoying.
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
DSL or Cable would buy it. I have cable TV but most of my watching is streamed from the net.
I have cable television, just dumped AT&T and went back to Comcast. AT&T's service was really substandard. When I first switched, they had 4 tuners and comcast had 2, but now the x1 box has 5, and it's interface is light years ahead of the Uverse interface.
The real kicker is that every on-demand show lets me fast forward, Uverse restricts this on anything. If the DVR didn't get it I would torrent before resorting to Uverse on-demand. Comcast on-demand is actually usable and has a significantly deeper library.
My biggest compliant is the Uverse DVR search. If a show is more then 13 days away, you can't set a recording. Comcast/Xfinity will let me set a recording for anything, even if it is currently only showing up as an on-demand offering.
Cheap storage VM.
Compared to other offerings, the telecommunications companies' offerings pale in comparison. Further, as the number of competitors gets fewer and fewer with mergers, people most likely feel like they are getting shafted and deliberately denied choice. I definitely notice when their lobbyists shut down municipal broadband. Also, that bot that was fraudulently submitting comments to the FCC in the names of real people (in alphabetical order, millions of comments) had to have been paid for by one of these companies.
Also, AT&T's business practices (not just the political lobbying which stomps on their customers' heads) are most disrespectful - for their cell phones, they partner with the provider to lock the bootloader, taking away any individual ability to remove their bloatware and run a clean OS.
Further, these recent bills they promoted to allow ISPs to sell customer private data to unsavory parties (they got it passed) shows their utter, blatant disregard for any customer rights.
Our country's telecommunications companies are awful. I'd never work for them / with them in a million years. They need to be broken up again, and this time have their lines destroyed so we can install respectable systems.
That might be true on their price sheet, but you'll want to pay attention to all the taxes and fees on the cable package. Especially if you have their triple-play.
That's not rejection, that's bitching and moaning and ... given the effective monopoly (or collusion between the extremely limited choices leading to the same thing) you don't really have any choice to take your money elsewhere.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.