Sling TV closed out the first quarter of 2024 with 1.92 million subscribers. While Sling came close to the two million marker at the end of the second quarter of last year, this marks the first time in a long time that Sling TV has dropped below two million live TV subscribers.
Considering Sling ended 2023 as a while with 2.06 million subscribers, the live TV streaming service lost around 135,000 subscribers during the first three months of the year. When looking at the year-over-year change, Sling TV ended the first quarter of 2023 with 2.1 million subscribers, resulting in a loss of around 180,000 over the past twelve months.
As we noted in March, Sling had already started 2024 with fewer subscribers than it started 2018 with. As this latest update now confirms the subscriber base has shrunk even more since then, it would appear that Sling’s subscriber problem is getting worse.
One positive is that the subscriber decline during Q1 2024 was lower than the decline during the first quarter of the year before. In explaining the most recent quarterly subscriber loss, EchoStar pointed to fewer subscriber activations and increased competition in general.
“We lost approximately 135,000 net Sling TV subscribers during the three months ended March 31, 2024 compared to the loss of approximately 234,000 net Sling TV subscribers during the same period in 2023. The decrease in net Sling TV subscriber losses was primarily related to lower Sling TV subscriber disconnects in 2024 due to our emphasis on acquiring higher quality subscribers, partially offset by lower Sling TV subscriber activations. We continue to experience increased competition, including competition from other subscription video on-demand and live-linear OTT service providers, many of which are providers of our content and offer football and other seasonal sports programming direct to subscribers on an a la carte basis.”
With EchoStar also confirming 6.258 million Dish TV subscribers as of March 31, 2024, the total number of pay-TV customers stood at 8.178 million at the end of the first quarter. This is down around 350,000 compared to the 8.53 million reported at the start of 2024, and down even more when compared to the 9.2 million pay-TV subscribers reported at the end of Q1 2023.
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