The battle for dominance in the live TV streaming world is heating up between a growing number of companies. Sling TV, DIRECTV NOW, PlayStation Vue, YouTube TV, and Hulu are dominating the market and other upcoming services, such as Spectrum, CenturyLink, and fuboTV, are quickly making it a busy market.
The question now is who is winning and how many people subscribe to live TV streaming services. This is a hard number to pin down because services do not report their numbers. Instead services, such as DIRECTV NOW and Sling TV, combine their numbers with traditional pay-TV numbers. Other services, such as PlayStation Vue, do not release numbers at all.
In the past we have received information from sources such as the CEO of Discovery, who discussed the subscriber numbers for DIRECTV NOW and PlayStation Vue during an interview. Now Bloomberg says it has a source with detailed numbers about some of the largest live TV streaming services.
Per Bloomberg Sling TV currently has 1.7 million users according to two people with knowledge of the matter. DIRECTV NOW is reported to have 400,000 and PlayStation Vue has hit 450,000 subscribers as of April 2017 according to Bloomberg sources.
Now these sources are not the only way we can take a look at who is dominating the market. Instinet is a group that monitors app downloads for many popular apps. According to Instinet, which looked at live TV streaming service app downloads in June, Sling TV made up 65.8% of all downloads. YouTube TV was in second at 15.8% followed by DIRECTV NOW at 9.2%, PlayStation Vue at 8.5%, and Hulu at 0.7%.
This is for new customers only and could be hurting Hulu’s numbers because many of Hulu’s live TV subscribers may have already had the app. Though what we can see is Sling TV is still holding a strong lead and DIRECTV NOW and PlayStation Vue seems to be locked in a tight race for second place.
For now we will have to wait and see what happens. With other services getting ready to launch, the crown of live TV streaming king is still anyone’s to grab.
Please follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more news, tips, and reviews.
Need cord cutting tech support? Join our new Cord Cutting Tech Support Facebook Group for help.