Recently YouTube TV has been quiet about its subscriber numbers, but now thanks to a report from the Leichtman Research Group, we have an idea of just how large it is. According to the Leichtman Research Group Inc., YouTube TV is now the 5th largest TV provider in the United States.
According to this report, YouTube TV has about 5 million subscribers. This would make it larger than traditional cable TV providers Verizon, Cox, Optimum, and Mediacom.
According to this report, here are how the top live TV streaming services stack up:
- YouTube TV 5,000,000
- Hulu with Live TV 4,500,000
- Sling TV 2,334,000
- Fubo 1,445,000
*DIRECTV and DIRECTV STREAM were not broken out in this report. Combined, the two services have 13,100,000 million subscribers. AT&T no longer reports the number of subscribers for DIRECTV. DIRECTV STREAM reported 1.86 subscribers in 2019. It is unknown how many subscribers the service has right now.
YouTube TV trails traditional cable TV partners as Comcast has 16 million subscribers and Spectrum has 15 million. Dish is the 4th largest live TV provider, with 7.4 million subscribers.
YouTube TV is hoping the addition of the NFL Sunday Ticket will help it attract more subscribers. YouTube TV recently has been making a massive push to promote the NFL Sunday Ticket.
YouTube TV has also announced several new improvements to help make YouTube TV even better.
Here is what YouTube TV announced that is coming later this year:
Multiview: As many have noticed, we’ve started experimenting with the multiview feature. We rolled this out to all subscribers due to high demand during March Madness and are working on some improvements ahead of the NFL season. Stay tuned for more specific updates as we get closer to the start of the season.
Picture Quality Experiments: We’re testing transcoding changes, including a bitrate increase for live 1080p content over the next several weeks. These will target devices that support the VP9 codec with high-speed internet connections. If these go well, we plan to make them permanent by this summer. More info to come!