fuboTV Adds 224K Subscribers in Fourth Quarter, Rising to 1.46 Million to End 2022

The sports-focused live TV streaming service fuboTV released its fourth-quarter earnings report on Monday and revealed that the streamer had a total of 1.455 million total users.

That’s an increase of 224,000 over the 1.231 million users that the company reported at the end of Q3. The number represents a year-over-year increase of 323,000 users from the 1.1M fuboTV had at the end of 2021.

The numbers reported still leave fuboTV behind its competitors in the live TV market. The skinny bundle Sling TV recently reported having 2.3M users last month. In early February, Hulu Live TV reported adding 100,000 users to its platform growing to 4.5 million customers. While Google has not provided a concrete update since, last summer, YouTube TV became the first live streamer to eclipse 5M customers.

The streamer indicated that its internal guidance was that it would grow to 1.52 million customers by the end of the 2023 fiscal year, which would just be just 65K more than they ended 2022. The lack of forecasted growth comes as there were many changes coming into 2023 — namely price hikes.

The biggest news for Fubo users in the fourth quarter was the addition of regional sports networks (RSNs) from Bally Sports. Although two of those networks did not roll out on the service until last week, all 19 Bally Sports RSNs are now available on the service.

Unfortunately for fuboTV users, the increased offerings of RSNs led to an increase in price, as well. All plans offered by Fubo saw a base increase of $5, plus boosted RSN fees of $11 for customers with one RSN in their market and $14 for those with two or more. Fubo’s CEO was confident that users would be willing to pay more to get more access to live sports, but the verdict is still very much out on that assessment.

It might be hard to convince users the cost is worth it if fuboTV keeps dropping channels as it has recently. Fubo is no longer carrying the collection of AMC networks, announcing on New Years Day that it was ditching the channels. Some Fubo users are also currently stuck with a national CBS feed, as a dispute between the network and its affiliates forced the service to drop the local feeds in 160 markets.

It wasn’t all bad news for fuboTV users in Q4, however. The service added more features that allow parents to control what their kids are watching, and now allows users to record their favorite pre and post-game shows on DVR. Fubo also came to a carriage agreement with the Scripps Broadcasting company allowing it to carry ION, Court TV and more. Additionally, fuboTV now carries Speedvision, a racing-centric network for all the gear-heads out there.