Dish Continues to Lose Pay-TV Subscribers

TWC is very location dependent. My sister has it in the Kansas City area and isn't impressed, neither am I.

I switched to Mediacom earlier this year with my owned Tivo Roamio Plus. Loved the Tivo and at first the HD PQ was fine. But the node in my neighborhood is very old and they were going to change it out but didn't. Consequently the video and audio glitches and overall HD PQ problems made me come running back to Dish. It did save me money to be with them, but their service just wasn't up to snuff and I told them so when I cancelled.


cable isn't available to everyone and some places are not up to snuff, but in the places where it is good- it is good.

Except for their equipment, of course. Our tivos are great, the roku app works incredibly well, and every TV in the house is connected and in HD.

We are saving ~$100/month compared to what we were paying for all 3 services before. Dish alone was almost $100.
 
That's definitely not my reason for Dish/Hopper service. I have about 100 channels from AEP on my Favorites list that I can browse on an 8 day grid. I enjoy TV series shows, drama, science, cooking, Home improvement, etc. (add movies for my wife). I have timers set for new episodes for about 80 series (they are not all in season at once). I record and watch at my convenience. The guide grid is easy to browse for new shows each new day. I have Netflix, Amazon Prime, and You tube for streaming. They are not particularly easy to browse and the content for regular TV shows doesn't match Dish. It use them for a few series and 4k. I'm not cutting the cord and I rarely care about sports.
How old are you Pat? Just wondering if you fit into the older generations( 50 and up) who pay for their tv. As for DISH , I have them for the same reasons you do . I watch a lot of series tv and love movies and I don't watch sports at all. But that is what seems to be keeping a lot of people from cutting the cord. You can get most everything online ,except for live sports.
 
It will be a long time before some telcos replace copper/POTS (Frontier, FairPoint, CenturyLink, Windstream) lots of rural areas with lots of miles of old copper in between houses.
The pressure is on to beat cable and wireless to the punch. I think you're going to be surprised.
 
Wireless sucks at lake house. I was surprised Windstream even offered DSL out there. They actually ran 2 fiber cables 10 miles from town to service everyone around that area of the lake. 6MB service, just out of reach for 12MB. With the DSL, I can at least use an ATT microcell for the cell phones. No worry about cable ever being out there and wireless improvement is just as remote a possibility. The copper will be around a long time.
 
Wireless sucks at lake house. I was surprised Windstream even offered DSL out there. They actually ran 2 fiber cables 10 miles from town to service everyone around that area of the lake. 6MB service, just out of reach for 12MB. With the DSL, I can at least use an ATT microcell for the cell phones. No worry about cable ever being out there and wireless improvement is just as remote a possibility. The copper will be around a long time.
Same here. AT&T and Verizon wireless work decent. I have a Wilson Electronics whole home booster set up, works good in the house with that if cellular is needed. No cable, and never will be any here. CenturyLink has 4.0 DSL works good some times, sometimes it doesn't.
 
Whoa. Since when is 50 old? I still think of myself as a kid.
50 and up makes you eligible for AARP membership-the largest senior citizen association. That officially puts you in the senior citizen group that advertisers promptly ignore. They only like to target the 18 -49 age group ,because they think that they are still working and have the most money. That isn't necessarily true in fact, but that is what they do. I'm 53 and I still do everything I did when I was younger ,except drink and party in clubs. I ask about age ,because the younger millennials are not spending on pay tv and the only real people still doing this are the older generations , like 50 and up.
 
My dad is in his late 60's and my stepmom just turned 65, they only keep Dish because of Nascar and Food Network, everything else they watch is OTA. They use the Slingbox for Nascar when in Las Vegas and Tivo for locals out there.

When my mom moved into my lake house to be closer to everyone, she didn't want satellite anymore either. DTVPal Dvr for OTA was fine with her. I changed the Pal to a Tivo and between 30 OTA channels/subchannels and the occasional show on Netflix she has more than she can keep up with.

I'm 46 and I can't remember for sure. I believe my Dad got us cable around 1979 in Tulsa. Never had anything other than OTA out at the ranch. I'm not tied to paytv as much as I was a few years ago. Football and 3 shows is about all I watch on pay channels.

I just agreed to buy a new house this past week and for the first time in over 15 years, I am seriously considering Cox for TV. With the Tivo and bundling TV with Internet the yearly savings appear to be substantial. Still got to figure out what all the various franchise fees and stuff below the line are going to be. It may not be as substantial as it appears, but it definitely has me looking. If I could get FS1 on SlingTV, I wouldn't have any trouble going OTA and OTT.
 
I agree with you 100%. The price of the average cable/sat bundle has reached the tipping point. Anymore increases on top of what they are already charging will just speed up the defections. That is why I see DISH trying to make smaller bundles in a way to stay some of the losses. Now how they reach that right combo of channels , I'm sure will be dictated by the channel providers like Viacom, Disney etc. Now I have said for YEARS that DISH could cut some of their losses by reducing and or ELIMINATING some of their various made up , charge them because they can DISH FEES. Will it reduce some of their profits? YES, but so will the continual loss of subs due to cord cutting and regular churn. Now in their latest promo for new subs , I see DISH has done just that. No DVR fees for two years, NO charge for HD or locals etc. PRICE locked for two years at $49.99. IF DISH would cut their dvr fees down to a reasonable amount or completely eliminate them , that might stay some of their losses for a short while,but eventually the prices that the channel companies are charging for their continual carriage will be what completely destroys the current dieing model. Eventually DISH will have to make changes or they will die, just like the rest of the cable industry.

Ala cart is what people want and they have been saying that for years. YES, You will pay more for the channels you want, but their will be no more spreading the costs and subsidizing of ESPN over all the cable and sat subs by placing them in the lowest programming packs. Sports is over priced and they need to be spun off into their own premium pack, just like the premium movie packs. If you like sports , you pay for them. If that means we end up with a whole lot of smaller niche channels going away, I'm all for it. I've said before that there is little to NO original content produced by them and mostly infomercials and reruns from nework tv. I could get by with about just my locals and about 15 channels myself. In fact if you could pay by the show , instead of the channels , I could get by with a whole lot less . If something doesn't change , the entire present day bundle will collapse in the next 5 years and there will be more buyouts, mergers till there are even less tv companies than we have today. I predict that DISH will be one of them .

Charlie has boxed himself into a corner with all his prior broken mergers and cooperation deals with various companies. His conduct in these deals has doomed DISH from working with just about all the big companies. His reputation precedes him and he is well reviled in the industry. He has all that bandwith that he will have to sell now ,since the T-mobile merger is effectively DEAD. His words not mine - due to the FCC decision to not count the discount for their purchase. With no cell phone company to partner with , DISH has no future as a sat company . If broadband starts to grow and reach the rural country , even satellite won't be needed in those areas. Now if DISH concentrates on making SLING tv the best with dvr or cloud services and makes the SLING app available on all the tvs and media streaming boxes, they might be able to segue into internet delivered media and just use the satellites and resources to pump that company up -including locals and or sports etc. But that would mean refocusing all their attention on that venture and let the present day satellite service continue to die out -and it will just like the big C-band sat service did.

The times are a changing and unfortunately DISH needs to change too , if they want to survive in some incarnation.

Yes you are correct
 
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That is the only thing saving the current sat/cable model today and that is the ability to watch live sports. It is also the thing that is causing the cord cutters and cord nevers to grow. Subsidizing the sports channels like ESPN by spreading the costs and ever increasing rate hikes in all programming packs , is what is hurting that model and is accelerating cord cutting. We have reached the point of diminishing returns on this model. Sports needs to be spun off into their own premium pack and or ott applications like HBO NOW , Showtime , CBS etc. Then you could cut the cord and still get your sports. But you will pay for them. Boy will you pay for them!

I'm in favor of having the sport channels being spun off into a package of their own. But boy is there ever resistance from the big sports channels to that! They know that if that happened the price would be high if they wanted to keep the same revenues/profits, but they also know that if it is high then they wouldn't be getting as many subscribers. I know it has been said that the price would be very high and I agree that would probably be the first prices you would see, but after the push back from potential subscribers, the prices would lower. The question is would they find a price that resulted in good subscriber numbers and still retain profits that are good enough?

Overall the cable/sat companies are in a bind. D* has done better than almost all of them and I think it is because of all the sports they have compared to all the others. Going forward I think it will be interesting to see what happens with those younger folks that are not subbing now as they age and have families.
 
I'm in favor of having the sport channels being spun off into a package of their own. But boy is there ever resistance from the big sports channels to that! They know that if that happened the price would be high if they wanted to keep the same revenues/profits, but they also know that if it is high then they wouldn't be getting as many subscribers. I know it has been said that the price would be very high and I agree that would probably be the first prices you would see, but after the push back from potential subscribers, the prices would lower. The question is would they find a price that resulted in good subscriber numbers and still retain profits that are good enough?

Overall the cable/sat companies are in a bind. D* has done better than almost all of them and I think it is because of all the sports they have compared to all the others. Going forward I think it will be interesting to see what happens with those younger folks that are not subbing now as they age and have families.
Agree with you except on DIRECTV. They lost 133,000 last quarter , so they are talking about breaking the big bundles into smaller ones to stave off more losses. They can't say all those losses were tighter credit practices or can they? Depends on whether you believe that cord cutting is accelerating or the company just can't attract new subs.

www.tvpredictions.com/directv080815.htm
 
I hadn't seen those number for D* when I wrote that. That does change the outlook a bit, doesn't it? Personally I don't think 'tighter credit practices' were actually part of the decline with D*, I think that is a convenient excuse. I wonder what our resident dealers/installers are seeing when they try to sign someone up? Are they seeing any significant change in how many get turned down for credit?
 
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I'm in favor of having the sport channels being spun off into a package of their own. But boy is there ever resistance from the big sports channels to that! They know that if that happened the price would be high if they wanted to keep the same revenues/profits, but they also know that if it is high then they wouldn't be getting as many subscribers. I know it has been said that the price would be very high and I agree that would probably be the first prices you would see, but after the push back from potential subscribers, the prices would lower. The question is would they find a price that resulted in good subscriber numbers and still retain profits that are good enough?

Overall the cable/sat companies are in a bind. D* has done better than almost all of them and I think it is because of all the sports they have compared to all the others. Going forward I think it will be interesting to see what happens with those younger folks that are not subbing now as they age and have families.
As for the sports channels being spun off and the costs, the spin off would produce true free market pricing to result. This would also make the sports channels have to re think their entire pricing structure due to loss of all the subs who would NO longer be Forced to subsidize their channels. They would also have to cut what they are charging to attract new subs and keep what they already have. True free market prices would then result and the consumer would benefit instead of the company. Kind of like what is happening with the premium movie packs offering 1/2 promos for 6 months, free fro 3 months etc. Hell I got Hbo for $10.00 for the life of the DISH account-as long as DISH doesn't rescind the offer like they do all their other offers eventually. Anyone remember the NO fee 501 dvrs? How about the 2nd hopper for only $7.00-now $12.00?
 
I hadn't seen those number for D* when I wrote that. That does change the outlook a bit, doesn't it? Personally I don't think 'tighter credit practices' were actually part of the decline with D*, I think that is a convenient excuse. I wonder what our resident dealers/installers are seeing when they try to sign someone up? Are they seeing any significant change in how many get turned down for credit?

Yes, it is now much harder to qualify a customer for Dish. DirecTV currently has much less stringent credit requirements.
 
Although I think he should respond to the responses he gets in this thread ,rather than carpet bomb us with news links.
That is precisely what we all are complaining about. Carpet bombing IS spam/troll behavior.
 

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