DirecTV is generally assumed to be America's third largest pay TV operator, but insight into its subscriber churn has been almost completely obscured since 2021, when the company was spun off from publicly traded AT&T and placed in control of private equity firm TPG Capital.
Using proprietary methods, Leichtman Research Group provides a quarterly estimate of DirecTV's customer comings and goings (OK, they're all "goings" at this point). And according to the research company, the operator lost 1.8 million customers last year across DirecTV satellite TV, DirecTV Stream and AT&T U-verse.
In its latest U.S. pay TV customer tally for the largest operators, LRG also makes an informed estimate for YouTube TV, following Google's disclosure in early February that the virtual MVPD has surpassed 8 million users. The research company estimates that the platform added 1.9 million users last year -- entirely plausible, given that Google declared a count of around 5 million users in July 2022.
Beyond that, LRG's tally of pay TV subscriber counts is fairly straight-forward, including numbers included in the most recent quarterly earnings reports. Here's a snapshot of where the top pay TV operators stood at the end of last year:
