The US Dish Network DTH pay TV service saw its revenues and net income rise but its subscriber numbers fall dramatically in its latest quarterly results
Revenues lifted 2% to 2.9 billion and net income was up by 21% to $312 million from $258 million a year earlier.
But for the first time, certainly within the past five years, the numbers of customers crashed, now that AT&T is no longer selling for Dish, falling by some 94,000 subscribers during the three months, which is roughly in line with the numbers we projected it to lose once AT&T pulled out of marketing efforts.
Management blamed the current overall economic environment and the saturation of pay-TV in US households and the fact that during the run up to the digital switchover, most cable operators had extremely low offers in the market to soak up market share. Dish is normally known as the low priced pay TV supplier, and for the past quarter it was not.
The distribution relationship with AT&T accounted for 17% of Dish’s gross subscriber additions during 2008, but in the last three months AT&T only contributed 5% of additions. Next quarter it will be none.
Dish was generally accepted as being slow to push HD channels to its local territories with DTH leader DirecTV taking the lead here, and although it has now addressed this, there is still a perception that DirecTV has more and better HD content.