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Sling TV touts 2.2 million subscribers as cord cutting continues

It's a fraction of Dish's total subscribers, but the number keeps growing.

Corbis via Getty Images

With how popular cord-cutting is, you'd think more services would be keen to share their subscriber stats. Dish pulled back the curtain today and revealed that its Sling TV service has some 2.2 million folks paying for the service. That's compared to just over 11 million Dish satellite customers. Those numbers don't mean a ton on their own, but when you compare them to AT&T's DirecTV Now numbers you can get a sense of where each are at. Last October, the telco reported that its streaming service had 787,000 subscribers. Of course, Sling TV has been around around a year longer, so that's to be expected.

As far as the rest of Dish's business goes, the company picked up an estimated 39,000 new subscribers in the fourth quarter -- an increase of around 11,000 versus last year. Those gains couldn't offset a slight decrease in annual revenue from subscribers ($14.26 billion versus $15.03 billion), or total revenue ($3.48 billion versus $3.75 billion).

All told, while Dish might be doing better with Sling TV than AT&T is with DirecTV Now, AT&T still leads the pack in terms of overall subscribers (25.1 million). But with a $1.2 billion profit thanks to tax benefits, Dish probably can breathe easy while it figures out how to boost those subscription numbers.