DirecTV Says Its Subscriber Losses During the Ongoing Disney Blackout Are 'Not Immaterial'

DirecTV Chief Marketing Officer Vince Torres told investors Thursday that the pay TV company is indeed losing "not an immaterial amount of customers" amid a program licensing dispute with Disney, which has seen ABC, ESPN and other Disney networks blacked out on DirecTV platforms since Sept. 1.

Torres did, however, express confidence that DirecTV can "claw back" these subscriber losses over time.

“The way we look at it is a short-term and long-term perspective," Torres said at a Goldman Sachs investor event. "In the short term, we were offering a very rich credit to customers that are impacted, and that may never be enough for someone who is annoyed that that they can’t watch their college football game over the weekend."

The credit Torres referred to was the $30 DirecTV is offering customers to sign up for other MVPDs, virtual and otherwise, while it sorts out its beef with Disney.

Will these customers really come back?

Back in July 2021, just before it spun DirecTV off in a deal with private equity, AT&T said that its pay TV company had 15.412 million remaining subscribers. The was the last time that subscriber numbers were publicly reported for DirecTV.

A source close to the company told me Thursday that the company has around 11 million subscribers dispersed across DirecTV satellite TV, DirecTV Stream and U-verse.

So a pay TV company that has averaged around 1.5 million lost customers a year can expect to re-acquire what it loses in this carriage war?

Tough to imagine.