Bharti Airtel, the Indian telco, has announced that its video streaming service, Airtel Xstream Play, has crossed the five million paid subscriber mark and continues to be the fastest growing OTT aggregator in the country. Airtel Xstream Play offers a bouquet of OTT content aggregated on a single app. Customers have access to content from […]
Charlie Ergen’s Dish Network, despite currently suffering some 77 local channels being blacked out over carriage disputes, is putting its prices up by $5 per month. Penalties for not paying the monthly fee on time will also rise from a nominal $2 to a more aggressive $12 whenever a payment date is missed. Prices go […]
Charlie Ergen, who is chairman of both DISH Network and EchoStar, is reportedly looking to merge the two businesses. Both companies are said to have appointed advisors, according to Semafor who first reported the story. DISH Network looks after Ergen’s declining pay-TV business including its DISH Anywhere and Sling OTT services. DISH is also the […]
Charlie Ergen, the founder and billionaire owner of US pay-TV broadcaster Dish Network, has talked for a couple of years about the “inevitability” of merging with arch-rival DirecTV. Both are losing subscribers at a worrying rate, and common sense suggests that a merger is the only route to saving cash, exploiting synergies and reducing the […]
Pay-TV operator DISH Network has suffered a major fall in subscribers according to its Q1 financials. Dish TV and its OTT sister service Sling TV, lost an overall 552,000 subscribers during the first quarter of the year. The same period in 2022 saw losses of 462,000 net subscribers (and 268,000 in Q4/2022). The Charlie Ergen-backed […]
Barely two weeks ago on March 10th, Charlie Ergen’s DBS DISH Network lost a Utah jury verdict on a patent lawsuit with plaintiff ClearPlay. The verdict saw the Court award ClearPlay $469 million (€434m) in compensation. The action alleged that DISH’s ‘AutoHop/Hopper’ functions used ClearPlay’s patented skipping feature. ClearPlay’s technology allowed users to skip what […]
Charlie Ergen, co-founder of Dish and EchoStar, has something of a reputation as a poker player. Indeed, he was allegedly once banned from a casino at Lake Tahoe many years ago. A report from Tim Farrar of TMF Associates focuses on a filing by Globalstar which has notified the market that it had entered into […]
Charlie Ergen’s EchoStar has moved in regard to its coverage of the planet with S-band frequencies. EchoStar already has European coverage with its EchoStar Mobile Ltd under a licence from the EU (although due to expire in 2027). EchoStar has now dramatically expanded that coverage with a commitment to launch 28 satellites with Astro Digital […]
The US is continuing to see a steady evaporation of satellite TV subscribers. DirecTV, owned by AT&T, has lost a worrying 47 per cent of its subscribers since it was acquired by AT&T in 2015. Charlie Ergen’s DISH Network is in a similar situation and in an SEC filing on January 17th admitted that it […]
Charlie Ergen, founder and chairman of DISH Network, speaking to analysts following the company’s Q3 earnings call, stated that the much-discussed merger between the US satellite pay-TV operators was getting closer. He told analysts that merger discussions ahead of the upcoming mid-term elections were difficult. “You’re hesitant to be a political football for somebody to […]