A new report from IHS shows that US pay TV companies suffered their worst ever quarterly video subscriber losses in Q2, losing 658,450 subscribers. According to IHS, this is the first time non-cable pay TV operators lost video subscribers, since satellite operators entered the pay TV business in the early 1990s.
IPTV operators achieved growth of less than 1% in Q2, compared to 4% in the second quarter of 2013 and 3% in Q2 2014. However, satellite and cable company subscriptions declined less than 1% year on year. Cable operators showed a very slight improvement in Q2 2015 over Q2 2014, as the effective bundling of faster-than-IPTV broadband and video gave cable TV companies a small local advantage over IPTV.
According to the report, both of the satellite operators in the United States lost significant numbers of video subscribers in Q2 2015. Although Dish attempted to mask losses by including Sling TV subscribers, IHS estimates that the company lost 285,000 total subscribers, while DirecTV lost 133,000, without NFL Sunday Ticket promotions to fall back on.
