AT&T’s CEO Expects DIRECTV NOW & DIRECTV Losses to Increase in the Second Quarter of 2019

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson gave a talk about the current state of AT&T at a J.P. Morgan Conference. A lot of news was made about his announcement of a new “thin” version of DIRECTV and how AT&T is trying to get low revenue customers to cancel. One thing that slipped through the cracks was a warning about the second quarter of 2019 subscriber numbers for their TV service.

AT&T’s CEO announced that they expect the second quarter of 2019 to have even higher losses than the first quarter where AT&T lost 500,000+ TV customers.

“Second quarter is always seasonally high in terms of churn. But you’re not going to see that mitigate this year. It’s going to take pretty much this year to work through this customer cleanup,” AT&T’s CEO and President Stephenson said during a J.P. Morgan Conference.

This is similar to the warning Stephenson gave before DIRECTV NOW reported its first subscriber losses. It also comes as DIRECTV NOW raised its price in the second quarter of 2019. (AT&T announced the price hike at the end of the first quarter, but the price hike didn’t take effect until the second quarter.)

How big the losses will be is unknown, but it sounds like AT&T is expecting losses to be greater than 500,000.

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