AT&T today announced its earnings for the second quarter of 2020. And the downward trend continues.
AT&T TV Now — that's the pure streaming version of AT&T's video service that lets you use whatever you want to watch — has 720,000 subscribers as of June 30, 2020. That's a net loss of 68,000 subscribers on the quarter, and down from about 1.33 million subs for Q2 2019. (The service was called DirecTV Now back then.)
On the whole (and the whole of AT&T's video offerings is pretty sweeping), AT&T ended Q2 with 18.4 million video connections. That's down from 22.9 million for Q2 2019.
The "premium TV" offerings — which also included AT&T TV, which is the version that requires you to have some AT&T hardware connected to your AT&T internet connection — dropped 886,000 subscribers.
But there was a little good news on the part of HBO, which is owned by WarnerMedia, which is owned by AT&T. Total subscribers to HBO and HBO Max (which are sort of the same thing, but not really) were up about 1.7 million subscribers from Q2 2019, to 36.3 million total.
In the earnings call recorded after the quarterly report was filed, AT&T CEO John Stankey said that some 4.1 million customers had activated an HBO Max account.
"One month after launch, HBO Max had about 3 million retail subscribers, and 4.1 million subscribers had activated their Max account," Stankey said. "Of those, more than 1 million were wholesale subscribers through AT&T."
