A sneak peek into AT&T’s Q4 2016 came via an 8-K filing this week with the juicy tidbit that the company had 200,000 video net adds in the quarter, which were “entirely driven” by DirecTV Now. According to Wells Fargo Senior Analyst Jennifer Fritzsche, that firm had forecast 25,000 net video adds.
“Video adds of 200K is a solid headline number, though [AT&T] noted it was entirely driven by [DirecTV Now] adds, which we hadn’t accounted for in our 25K estimate,” Fritzsche explains.
In its Q3 report to investors, AT&T said it added 323,000 DirecTV subscribers, but its U-verse TV service shed 326,000 as the company increasingly emphasized satellite sales. So, in Q3 2016, AT&T sluffed off a total of 3,000 video subs.
It is of course still early days for the DirecTV Now live TV streaming service, which only just launched at the end of November. Technical gremlins, while to be expected with such a launch, have been garnering more negative press attention in the last few weeks, not to mention some vociferous complaints from consumers on social media. You can read more about that issue here.
AT&T is scheduled to report Q4 earnings on Wednesday. More on AT&T’s filing, including better-than-expected numbers for its wireless business is in this article at our sister site, Wireless Week.
