StarHub’s pay-TV base continues to slide along with average revenue per user, hitting three year lows at the end of Q1 2020. 

BUT (and it’s a big one), the quarterly pay-TV subs decrease is by far the lowest since the beginning of 2017, with a loss of 2,000 subs in the first three months of this year. 

And bosses at what was once Singapore’s-dominant pay TV platform are taking this as a good sign.

From end March 2017 to end March this year, StarHub’s subscriber base has dropped 33%, from 487,000 to 327,000.

ARPU is down from S$51/US$36 to S$38/US$27 – a drop of just under 26%. 

The biggest loss in the last 13 quarters was in Q3 2019, when the platform dropped 27,000 subs in three months. 

This followed a 20,000 loss in in Q2 2019. 

Two more quarters of losses brought the annual total shrinkage last year to 80,000 – a 32.5% jump from the 54,000 subs lost in 2018. 

Despite a decline in subs numbers, StarHub kept ARPU stable at around S$51 through 2017 and 2018 (with a bump to S$53 in the second quarter of 2018). 

From 2019, ARPU started dropping. The biggest loss was in this latest quarter, with a fall from S$44 at end Dec to $38 at end March.