Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Audio / Video
  3. News

Dish subscriber numbers have fallen, but Sling TV is still on the rise

By

dish-network
Dish Network
While Sling TV has yet to take off the way Dish might have hoped it would, it seems that the company was wise not to keep all of its eggs in the satellite TV basket. Although its subscriber numbers have continued to fall, its Sling TV subscriber base is growing.

The company saw a loss of 12,000 total pay-TV subscribers in the last quarter, according to its latest earnings report. That makes for a total loss of 81,000 subscribers lost in 2015, slightly more than the 79,000 subscribers the company lost in 2014.

Recommended Videos

Dish combines its satellite TV subscribers with Sling TV subscribers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Sling TV is losing subscribers. A research report from MoffetNathanson estimates that Sling TV added 129,000 subscribers over the last quarter, FierceCable reports.

Related

The company has kept relatively quiet about the number of Sling TV subscribers it has, aside from its initial announcement of 169,000 users in the month following its launch. While some estimate the current subscriber number to be around 400,000, that number could be over 600,000, according to a report yesterday from the Wall Street Journal.

Though subscriber numbers are down overall, Dish actually saw a revenue increase over 2015. Total revenue for the year was $15.1 billion, up from the $14.6 billion the company earned in 2014. Actual operating income was down, however, at $1.3 billion compared to $1.8 billion in 2014, which Dish says comes from an FCC auction expense of $516 million.

Cord-cutters are only partially to blame for the drop in numbers. While Dish is down, both Time Warner and Comcast added video subscribers over the last quarter.

While the future of satellite TV isn’t looking particularly bright, the prospects for Sling TV seem brighter. In January Goldman Sachs analyst Brett Feldman estimated that the streaming TV service could see a total of 2 million subscribers by the end of 2016.

That still seems like a long shot, but not as much as it once did. After all, those former satellite subscribers have to go somewhere.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Kris Wouk
Kris Wouk
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Kris Wouk is a tech writer, gadget reviewer, blogger, and whatever it's called when someone makes videos for the web. In his…
Sling Orange vs. Sling Blue: Which Sling TV package is best?
Sling TV logo.

Sling TV does things differently. It’s not like the other live streaming services (also referred to as linear services because everyone’s watching the same thing at the same time as served up by the networks) because it doesn’t just have a single plan. In fact, it’s not even that it has multiple tiers of plans.

No, Sling TV is still as close as you can get to a la carte TV—even though it is also definitely not that. You can’t pick and choose your channels on Sling TV, but you can pick and choose bundles of them.

Read more
Are NHL games on Sling TV?
NHL on Sling TV.

Sling TV isn’t necessarily synonymous with sports, but that’s not to say you can’t watch sports on Sling TV. And to narrow things down even further, yes, you can watch NHL games on Sling TV.

Whether you can watch all the NHL games on Sling TV -- that’s another question.

Read more
Is Sling TV free with Amazon Prime?
Sling TV.

If you’ve ever wondered whether Sling TV is free if you also have Amazon Prime, wonder no more. It is not. And that’s because they are two entirely separate services, each with its own subscription.

Here’s the deal: Sling TV is what’s known as a multiplatform video distributor, or MPVD, in industry parlance. You pay a fee every month, and Sling TV gives you access to a bunch of linear channels in return. It’s a bit like cable TV in that way, only via the internet, and you have a little more control over how much you spend every month, and also which channels you end up getting.

Read more