Sling TV just shot itself into a new subscriber stratosphere, growing its customer count by 47 percent year over year.
At the end of 2017, the Dish Network streaming service boasted 2.212 million subscribers, the company revealed Wednesday along with its fourth-quarter and full-year earnings. A year earlier, it celebrated the holidays with just a hair over 1.5 million.
All told, the Dish corporation closed Q4 with 13.242 million pay-TV subscribers. The majority of them — 11.030 million, to be exact — were still on the main satellite-dish television service. In other words, it’s still about 83 percent traditional satellite customers and 17 percent streamers.
It wasn’t all great news for the parent company this morning, though: Dish’s 2017 earnings and revenue both shrunk from the prior year. Dish TV satellite subs slipped 9 percent from 2016, though surely a significant number of those cord-shaved (dish-shaved?) to the company’s Sling service.
In terms of just the fourth quarter, Dish beat Wall Street’s earnings expectations by a penny per share, but it but fell short of revenue forecasts.