The top seven publicly traded pay-TV operators lost about 44,000 video subscribers during 2015, according to FierceCable's tally, based on full-year earnings reports.
The last of the big publicly traded operators to report earnings, Dish Network (NASDAQ: DISH) said last week that it lost 81,000 customers last year.
An earlier informal tally conducted by FierceCable and based on earnings reports from AT&T (NYSE: T), Verizon (NYSE: VZ), Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA), Charter Communications (NASDAQ: CHTR) and Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC), the six platforms finished 2015 by adding 37,000 video subscribers.
This tally doesn't include data from Cablevision (NYSE: CVC), or mid-sized operators like Suddenlink Communications or Mediacom.
The biggest gainer in pay-TV this year was Verizon FiOS, which added 178,000 video users in 2015, a sharp drop from the 422,000 added in 2014. FiOS added only 20,000 video customers in the fourth quarter.
The big decliner was AT&T's forsaken U-verse platform, which lost 304,000 video customers for the year, and a whopping 240,000 in the fourth quarter alone. Pouring its promotional energy into its newly acquired DirecTV platform these days, AT&T saw the satellite TV unit add 214,000 customers in the fourth quarter and 156,000 for the year.
The difference-maker this year was, of course, cable. Both TWC (up 36,000 for 2015) and Charter (up 11,000) experienced growth years in video for the first time in a decade, while Comcast added 89,000 video subs in the fourth quarter to finish the year down by 36,000.
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