Dish Loses 96,000 Pay-TV Subscribers in Q2

(Image credit: Dish Network)

ENGLEWOOD, Colo.—Dish Networks lost a total of 96,000 pay-TV subscribers in the second quarter of 2020, which includes customers of both Dish TV and Sling TV.

Dish TV net subscribers decreased by 40,000 in Q2, as well as 56,000 Sling TV subscribers, for a total of 96,000. However, those numbers are better than the amount of subscribers that left in Q2 2019, which was a combined 127,000.

An interesting element to Dish’s subscribers for Q2 was the return of thousands of commercial accounts. Because of the disruption COVID-19 had on businesses, Dish paused or provided temporary rate relief for 250,000 commercial accounts, removing them from its pay-TV subscriber numbers at the end of Q1 2020. In Q2, 45,000 of these account were reactivated and added back to the overall subscriber count (but were not counted as new subscribers), which gave Dish an overall subscriber count increase of 5,000 at the end of Q2 compared to Q1.

The official pay-TV subscriber numbers for Dish are 11.27 million subscribers—9.02 million for Dish TV and 2.25 million for Sling TV.

As far as overall revenue for Q2, Dish reported it brought in $3.19 billion, down from $3.21 billion year-over-year. The total yearly revenue for Dish at the end of Q2 was $6.4 billion, up from $6.39 billion for the half-way point of 2019.

For more information, visit ir.dish.com.