YouTube TV has been widely available for seven days now, and 147,300 smartphone and tablet users have downloaded it so far, according to mobile-data company Apptopia. Seventy-three percent of those consumers have downloaded the app via Google Play.
Adweek reached out to Google, YouTube’s parent company, for comment on the numbers, but the digital giant didn’t respond by press time.
It’s hard to say whether nearly 150,000 subscribers (paying $35 per month) in a week is strong, but the figure seems promising. For the sake of comparison, consider that Dish Network’s Sling TV, another option for cord cutters at $20 a month, reportedly has anywhere between 1 million and 2 million subscribers.
YouTube TV is available in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Philadelphia. It includes ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN, Fox Sports Network and Comcast SportsNet, among others, and was billed as offering a particularly robust streaming package for football, baseball, basketball and hockey fans without any additional add-ons or bonus subscription packages.
[“Source-adweek”]