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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 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.