Dish Networks said Thursday in its end of year financial report it lost 81,000 pay-TV subscribers in 2015 and 12,000 in the fourth quarter alone.
According to the report, Dish finished the year with 12.897 million pay-TV subscribers, down from 13.978 million at the close of 2014. The company said Sling TV subscribers were counted in the overall pay-TV metrics.
Though Sling TV numbers weren’t broken out in Thursday’s report or earnings call, the Wall Street Journal reported the service has drawn more than 600,000 subscribers since its launch a year ago. That represents a growth of more than 430,000 subscribers since the company’s announcement at the end of March that the service gained 169,000 subscribers in the month following its launch.
Dish CEO Charles Ergen said on Thursday’s earnings call the company believes Sling TV is a “high-growth business” and represents “the wave of the future” to bring in a class of customers the company lacks today. That said, Ergen noted more work needs to be done on Sling, particularly adding more content providers and updating the user interface to facilitate ease of navigation with an increased number of channels.
Dish said pay-TV average revenue per user (ARPU) was up to $86.79 for the full year compared to $83.77 in 2014, but churn took a hit and rose to 1.71 percent in 2015 from 1.59 percent the year prior.
Hindered by an FCC auction expense of $516 million and a $123 million expense for impairment of long-lived assets, Dish’s operating income also slid to $1.3 billion for the full year 2015 from $1.8 billion the year before.
The company said it added 46,000 net broadband subscribers in 2015, bringing its subscriber base to 623,000 for the full year.
