- And you thought Sling TV was having a rough time.
Last week we talked about how Sling
only gained 50,000 subscribers
in the last three months of last year.
Well, this week we're talking about DirecTV Now,
which lost 267,000 subscribers
in the same time period, yikes!
So the question is why,
and that's what I'm gonna attempt to answer today
and as a bonus, I'm gonna help them fix it all.
So stick around for that, let's dive in.
(techno music)
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Anyway, on to DirecTV Now.
Alright, so like I said in the intro,
267,000 subscribers lost for DirecTV Now
in the last three months of 2018.
This was not expected.
They did expect some losses and I'll tell you why.
In quarter three they raised their prices.
It was in July if I recall correctly.
They raised their prices by about five bucks
and they knew that would slow things down a little bit.
But then in quarter four, what happened was
they got rid of all their promo prices.
DirecTV Now has been around for about two years
and in the beginning they had some amazing promo deals.
In fact I think the lowest one
was if you were an AT&T unlimited customer
you could get DirecTV Now, their base package,
for 10 bucks a month.
It was a crazy good deal.
They had a lot of things like that,
maybe not all quite that great.
But when they got rid of them,
everybody started jumping ship.
So they knew that they were gonna take some losses,
but they were thinking maybe 20,000.
What they didn't expect was that the number
would be about 13 times that amount.
So you might be asking yourself
is losing a quarter million subscribers really that bad?
Well, in answer let's compare.
Sling TV gained 50,000 subscribers,
YouTube TV we don't have hard numbers on them,
but analysts say that they either stayed the same
or gained as many as 100 or 200,000 subscribers.
Hulu with Live TV gained a half million subscribers
at the same time.
And then you have all the other minor players
like Philo and fuboTV kind of nibbling at the edges.
So with that sort of competition,
yeah it's a big deal.
DirecTV Now is in a lot of trouble
and it ain't getting any better I can tell you that.
Because at the same time that all this bloodbath
was happening, AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson
mentioned that he wants to possibly
migrate DirecTV Now to a different platform
that would cost 50 to 60 bucks a month
and he also used the phrase "thin the content."
Oh, yeah, these people really know what we want, don't they?
They want less content for more money,
yeah you really got us pegged, sign me up.
So as a favor to good old Randy,
I'm gonna fix DirecTV Now's problems right now.
You can just send me a check whenever, it's fine.
Alright, listen up imaginary ladies and gentlemen
of the conference room that I've emptied for this occasion.
I'm gonna fix DirecTV Now.
Obviously, people aren't buying what you're selling,
they're leaving in droves.
And so what do you do?
You give them what they want.
And what we've wanted for years is a la carte TV.
And we're not really getting that with streaming.
There was some promise of that with other services
like Sling TV, but things have been going back
drifting toward the old cable and satellite platforms
of a bunch of channels in one platform
that you pay a high price for.
Let's just move toward the a la carte system
that we've all wanted anyway.
So, create a platform with three tiers.
If you purchase five channels or fewer,
then you get to choose each one that you want.
Five channels or fewer, it's six dollars a channel.
If you go between six and 10 channels,
then let's say the price drops down to four dollars
or five dollars and anything above 10,
you're paying three bucks a channel.
This is going to encourage people
to sign up for the channels that they actually want.
But it also kind of encourages them to sign up for more.
And there's already something like this.
This is getting so close.
You have things like HBO, that's going for 15 bucks
for that, but you can already see
that they're offering their own apps,
their own way to stream that.
ESPN now has ESPN Plus for five bucks a month
and you get access to all their content,
which is fantastic.
So these channels are already coming around.
You could have a system, this is an alternate idea,
where DirecTV Now simply offers a platform
to bring all these things together.
Say five or six bucks a month
for people to sign up for the platform
that handles all their subscriptions
to the HBOs and the ESPNs of the world
because more will be coming
and if you position yourself that way,
you can save DirecTV Now.
You're welcome, goodnight, Cleveland.
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so stick around, hit that bell icon,
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And next Wednesday I'm gonna be talking about
Hulu with live TV.
That is a, well, they're in a different category
from DirecTV now because in the same time period
that we were talking about today,
they gained a half million subscribers
and we're gonna tease out why that might be.
So stick around, thanks for watching this video, guys
and we'll see you on the next video.
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