Ergen talks up DirecTV merger
February 24, 2014
By Chris Forrester
Dish Network’s founder and chairman Charlie Ergen, speaking to analysts following his company’s results announcement, talked positively about the prospects of getting a long-anticipated merger between his company and arch-rival DirecTV.
Addressing the merger proposal between Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which he is against, he nevertheless accepted that “if you take the Number 1 and Number 4 [cable] players in pay-TV and put them together [then it] certainly doesn’t hurt the case for consolidation [of the USA’s two satellite broadcast giants]. It would be hard to see why you couldn’t put the Number 2 and 3 [players] together.”
Referring specifically to the Comcast-TWC merger, this would “send a seismic shift across our industry” that “puts pressure on everybody” in the video and broadband businesses in an “unprecedented” way, said Ergen. “There is nothing that’s positive about it for anybody in the video or broadband or content business.”