YouTube TV exceeds 8M subs, jumps past Dish

YouTube TV continues to be the success story in a beleaguered pay-TV sector.

YouTube TV, the virtual multichannel video programming distributor (vMVPD) that launched nearly seven years ago, has surpassed 8 million subscribers, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan revealed Tuesday via this blog post.

In addition to dominating the vMVPD sector, YouTube TV has also become a key (and rising) player in the broader pay-TV market. In fact, YouTube TV appears to have jumped past Dish Network, which ended Q3 2023 with 6.72 million satellite TV subs along with 2.12 million Sling TV customers.

"Based on our higher 3Q estimate, YouTube TV has now surpassed Dish Network to become the country's fourth largest MVPD of any kind," MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson concluded in this research note (registration required). "At the current trajectory, YouTube TV could already have passed DirecTV for third place in 4Q."

MoffettNathanson previously forecasted that YouTube TV had about 7 million subs as of Q3 2023. But, in light of this week's subscriber disclosure, they boosted that estimate to 7.25 million (700,000 net adds in the quarter versus a previous estimate of 350,000 net adds) – accounting for 40% of the vMVPD industry's 18 million subscribers.

"Now it's clear that the growth at YouTube TV is even stronger than we had anticipated," Nathanson wrote. He believes YouTube TV has clearly benefitted from its access to the NFL Sunday Ticket package, along with some "lingering disruption from the Charter/Disney dispute."

Related:US pay-TV subscriber base eroding at record pace

But YouTube TV's sub gains are not enough to offset the broader decline of pay-TV. MoffettNathanson estimates that just 26.5% of pay-TV sub losses were recaptured by a virtual MVPD such as YouTube TV.

With YouTube TV's new numbers factored in, MoffettNathanson estimates that pay-TV was declining at -6.8% at the end of Q3 2023 (up from a prior estimate of -7.3%).