DirecTV Now Gaining Rapid Subscriber Growth Despite Negative Reviews

DirecTV Now is the latest offering from AT&T and it has gained a much wider acceptance among the customers. Despite the many complaints from customers though due to the many inadequacies of the service, recent studies on the streaming performance of DirecTV Now show that the service has garnered a growing subscriber base.

John Hodulik, a chief analyst at UBS, discovered this increase in the subscriber rate in their recent observations on the performance of various streaming services. His team in UBS Evidence Lab tracked all the downloads of DirecTV Now since its launch, and also compared the performance of different streaming platforms with it, including Dish Network’s Sling TV, Verizon’s Go90, HBO Now, and Showtime’s streaming service.

The major findings of the study, as articulated in the words of Hodulik, reveal that, “DirecTV Now is holding up better than its peers since launch. We find that download rankings typically fall after week one (modestly for HBO Now, more so with others), which generally coincides with news coverage and the biggest ad push from their owners.”

Ever since its launch, the DirecTV Now streaming service has earned mostly negative reviews in the press and among the customers. The presence of more than 200 active forum threads of complaints in AT&T’s website states how DirecTV Now is dealing with many technical issues. This huge number of complaints is a testimony to the many glitches in the streaming service.

Nonetheless, even in this light of bad press and customer reviews, DirecTV Now has managed to get a good ranking. It is ranked 41st among entertainment apps of iPad downloads, which is a great position for a relatively new platform. In fact, DirecTV Now has managed to bypass their rival MVPD service Sling TV through this, which is at the 47th position currently.

The expectations put forward in the light of this study include some optimism on DirecTV Now’s services. “We expect the DirecTV Now app and content to evolve over time, becoming a more mobile-centric product,” Hodulik said. “AT&T plans to add non-platform content, DVR and multistream capabilities soon. We believe the main question remains the overall user experience and the quality of the product as it scales. While DirecTV Now faced some software issues at launch, management is confident they will be fixed within weeks.”

The findings of the study offer some key suggestions in improving the overall services of DirecTV Now as well. This includes mainly resolving many technical issues that will gradually aid in a positive development of the streaming service.