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DISH Network Chairman Charlie Ergen and DISH Network CEO Joe Clayton recently spoke about the lack of sports in NY on their earnings call.

Here is a portion of that transcript.

Question from Benjamin Swinburne - Morgan Stanley, Research Division

Great. And if I could just ask one follow-up to Charlie and/or Joe. And a lot of the sort of popular press continues to write about the need for smaller packages of programming, cheaper packages of programming, and I know DISH has tried that in the past with some low-end $25, $20 packages. And Time Warner Cable has one that they commented on their call that the demand has been pretty modest so far. I think you guys have a sports-free offer in New York, because you don't carry the RSNs here. Do you see that as a sort of a strategy going forward to try to take share, to sort of go after maybe a lower-end product? And if you do, what's the timing look like on rolling this more out and putting some marketing punch behind it?

Answer from Joseph P. Clayton

This is Joe Clayton. I'll try to take that. Charlie can comment if he'd like. I'm a big believer in having step-up selling and a good/better/best, if you will. And just recently, we incorporated into our programming offers a $19.99 starting package, if you will. And if we do this right, we will have variety selection and choice as a major differentiator for DISH in addition to a value that we create with our customers and also as we move forward, technical superiority in terms of our product. So yes, it's an important part of our marketing equation. And yes, we have already begun to implement that. But most importantly, we are still -- even at $19.99, we're looking for quality customers that have appropriate credit scores so they won't churn on us in a year or so.

Answer from Charles W. Ergen

This is Charlie. Just to -- I think this is going to be interesting because the price of sports programming has gotten so kind of out of line compared to what that -- so sports programming may be 20% of the viewing on a day-to-day basis but it may be 50% of the cost that the consumer pays, and so not everybody is -- probably most people in this call are sports enthusiast but not everybody is. And it's going to be interesting what happens because you've really got 4 providers in every market now, the phone company, cable company and 2 satellite companies so -- and everybody sells the same thing, everybody's packages are generally the same. And contractually, the sports providers require that you put their program in a vast majority of their contracts. So as contracts come up for renewal, I would say there could be a day when one of the big providers just doesn't have a sports offering so they can differentiate their programming in a major way so they -- I mean, in theory, their cost could be cut by half to the consumer but the consumer who really likes sports, those 20% or 30% of the people who are sports enthusiasts, would not be your customer. But you'd be more attractive to the other 50% or 60% or 70% of the customers that are out there. And if the economy continues to struggle along, that's probably a valid long-term strategy. We almost went there last year with FOX Sports. We ultimately were able to reach an agreement. But had we not, we were certainly prepared to not have regional sports. We don't do it in New York today, as an example, and we certainly have plenty of customers in New York. So I think that there's a limit to where sports cost can go and at some point, it's not going to be in 90% of the homes at some point if the costs go too high. So that is interesting to see, how it shakes out, and we're -- we look when -- we just look at that on a case-by-case, we'd like to -- I think we'd like to have sports. We'd like to have a lot of variety for our customers but we have to have deals that make sense. And there certainly becomes a time when a deal doesn't make any sense and a sports offering might not make sense, and that's been the case for us in New York. It could happen in other places.