Correct. And old media are struggling to monetize their marginalized role in the online world.
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DirecTV might merge with Dish by Monday
- Thread starter MadMan
- Start date
IMHO this is not a "merger" but a distress sale. EchoStar / Dish has $2 billion in debt due in November. They have less than $600 million on hand. Apparently EchoStar has a bunch of cell frequencies which is not mentioned in the deal. Interesting article from CNBC:
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
That would make the deal much more attractive to AT&T, which still owns 70% of DirecTV.
Yep. The EchoStar cell network is a portion of the former Sprint, as a divesture required by regulators when Sprint was sold to T-Mobile. I'm not sure if they are actually in commercial use right now.
Isn’t that 5G spectrum?
Looks like it’s official: DirecTV Acquires Dish, Unifying Struggling Satellite Business
It’s either a merger, or have one of the satellite companies shut down or disassembled in a bankruptcy.
Those opposing the merger can blather endlessly about “competition” and “consumer choice”, but with subscriber numbers plummeting there may simply be no longer any room for two players. Satellite radio found this out years ago.
Sirius and XM still run as 2 services using all of the satellites. DTV and Dish will have a harder time merging together.
From a business and customer facing standpoint they are a single entity. None of the subscribers care about, or are even aware of, any separate technical distribution platforms.
You can’t combine the resources of DTV and Dish as easily.
I'm guessing that DirecTV is no longer interested in satellite services in the long term (I don't know why they would be). A few years ago, AT&T announced the launch of their last DirecTV satellite, and said that once they started dying, that would be it. Maybe it's coming to that point now.
But you can combine Sling and DirectTV's streaming service very easily. That's the future.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Or if a DirecTV satellite is starting to fail and there's no other option for the part of the country that it serves, the merged entity might be able to move affected customers to the Dish Network platform, although that would be a costly solution.
Don’t satellites last for a really long time?
The cord cutting community is likely to be outraged at Sling being part of this. Yet another step toward the same old players taking over streaming along with the endless price hikes and other tactics that former cable and satellite customers are all too familiar with.
15 years is considered a typical service life for communications satellites, though some operate a bit longer.
Biggest issue is not the electronics, but the fuel used to keep the satellite stable and in position. That eventually runs out.
Sling was already part of "the same old players."
Complain to the content producers. Those costs are just being passed along. Streaming isn't immune to that.
For people outside areas served by cable, doesn't this mean a monopoly? And what happens when there is a dispute causing channels to be taken off? Now you can't switch to the other?
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