Fubo TV gives its first subscriber numbers as a public company

It's about 10 times smaller than the largest live streaming TV service in the United States

Fubo TV

Source: CordCutters (Image credit: CordCutters)

Fubo TV has been what we'd call a young upstart. We knew it wasn't anywhere near as big as Sling TV, YouTube TV or Hulu with Live TV — the latter being the biggest live streaming TV service the United States.

But we didn't actually have any numbers to go go along with Fubo. Until now. Fubo TV co-founder and CEO David Gandler, in a letter to shareholders of the newly combined FaceBank Group (you'll recall that FaceBank and Fubo TV merged this year) gave an update on FaceBank's 2019 year-end numbers, and some select standalone numbers for Fubo TV.

From the letter :

My partners and I founded fuboTV in January 2015 to serve the needs of U.S. soccer fans who were unable to stream international leagues. We then expanded to a full sports content offering before evolving in 2017 into a more transparent, user-friendly and less expensive alternative to traditional cable TV. Our vision became "come for the sports, stay for the entertainment" which you can stream anytime, anywhere including mobile, web and connected TVs, via Amazon Fire TV, Roku, Apple TV and more.

Fast-forward to today, where we believe fuboTV is at the forefront of the streaming revolution. We offer cord-cutters a total cable replacement with more top Nielsen-ranked sports, news and entertainment channels than in any other virtual multichannel video programming distributor's (vMVPD's) offering.

So that's the context. Now ... the numbers:

  • Fubo TV finished 2019 with 315,789 paid subscribers. That's up 37 percent year over year. (So it closed 2018 with about 230,503 paid subscribers.)
  • All Fubo TV users — but paid and those on a free trial — streamed a cumulative 298.7 million hours in 2019, up 210 percent year over year.
  • Users streamed an average of 129 hours a month, and those who streams on a smart TV streamed an average of 144 hours.

All that is to say that Fubo TV isn't huge. Not by the major players' standards, anyway. Hulu with Live TV, which led the United States at the end of Q1 2020, has some 3.2 million subscribers. Sling TV was in at least second place with 2.592 million. YouTube TV didn't give exact numbers, but said it had more than 2 million subscribers.