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Communications Television United States

DirecTV To Buy Rival Dish Network (variety.com) 41

Posted by msmash from the more-consolidation dept.
DirecTV has agreed to acquire struggling rival Dish Network, creating a satellite TV behemoth with nearly 20 million subscribers. The complex transaction, announced Monday, involves private equity firm TPG acquiring a majority stake in DirecTV from AT&T for $7.6 billion. DirecTV will then purchase Dish for $1 and assume its debt.

The deal provides a lifeline for Dish, which faces $2 billion in debt due November with only $500 million in available cash. EchoStar, Dish's parent company, will retain its wireless spectrum investments and operate independently. Subject to regulatory approval and creditor agreement, the merger is expected to close in late 2025. DirecTV and TPG will provide $2.5 billion to cover Dish's immediate financial needs. The deal's fate remains uncertain, as a similar 2002 merger attempt was blocked on antitrust grounds.
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DirecTV To Buy Rival Dish Network More

DirecTV To Buy Rival Dish Network

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  • Is there any place left in the market for these two?
    Probably not.

    • Rural areas and Sling TV (Score:5, Informative)

      by tepples ( 727027 ) <.tepples. .at. .gmail.com.> on Monday September 30, 2024 @02:22PM (#64829049) Homepage Journal

      As I understand it, the place in the market for home satellite television providers is customers in more remote, rural places out of the service area of cable or fiber. These customers end up stuck on wireless Internet, be it satellite or cellular, with a prohibitive monthly data transfer quota that rules out using

      Not to mention that the acquisition would include Dish's Sling TV, an Internet-delivered multichannel pay TV service used by many as a replacement for cable or satellite TV.

      • Starlink makes satellite TV obsolete. DirecTV is already pushing its streaming-only service. One can only hope that all of the 30+ shopping and infomercial channels will disappear in the process.

        • Starlink ain't gonna be ahit for streaming once they start jacking up the data rates

        • Starlink makes satellite TV obsolete.

          Basically this. My retired father lives up in BFE and he cancelled DirecTV the moment he discovered Netflix works just fine over Starlink. Just because someone lives in the middle of bumfuck nowhere doesn't mean they're somehow going to be okay with going back to crappy linear TV.

        • Starlink doesnt have the bandwidth to handle even a fraction of those subscribers.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by EvilSS ( 557649 )

        These customers end up stuck on wireless Internet, be it satellite or cellular, with a prohibitive monthly data transfer quota that rules out using

        Starlink has a soft 1TB cap, where they lower your priority. Depending on how many people are in your "cell" that may or may not make a difference to you. TMobile 5G home internet bumps you down 1 QoS level at 1TB, but again unless your tower is completely congested you wouldn't even notice it (I've shot past that cap many times and noticed no speed differences). AT&T Air currently has no soft caps.

        Not to mention that the acquisition would include Dish's Sling TV, an Internet-delivered multichannel pay TV service used by many as a replacement for cable or satellite TV.

        Dish also has an OTT service. If they manage Sling like they have their own I suspect it will end up losi

      • Its also cheaper than cable. And even with faults, service is miles higher than most cable companies.

  • Dish Network, Charlie Ergen, Terrible History (Score:3, Informative)

    by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 ) on Monday September 30, 2024 @01:55PM (#64828995)
    Dish Network has a long history with Charlie Ergen doing his best to make it the worst place in America to work. They've Won "awards" [yahoo.com] for being such a shithole. I used to steal their e employees left and right quite easily. They were just down the street and I had folks onsite telling me when they hired anyone new and I'd easily pull them after they'd had a taste of Charlie's "rules".

    Dish Network deserves to reap what it planted and go out of business. Something tells me there is going to be a lot of celebration when Charlie Ergan gets shown the door. Of course that probably also means they are going to lose a few of the security contractors they had at Dish to keep people from murdering Charlie (think I'm joking? He sat behind doors with armed guards at the office).
    • naw, you know how these things work, he will either get a cushy golden parachute or he will be offered a high paying job at DirecTV, with guarantees of so many years of employment or soooooo much in severance if he leaves/is let go.
      • They'd better let him keep the guards and the hardened office space if he stays. Based on the coders and systems folks I took from them, he'd likely end up dead in the parking lot without some serious security.
        • Well, you know, his death will obviously be a suicide, him shooting himself in the head 3 or 4 times...
        • I wonder how much that power and prestige is worth when he needs to have armed guards watching his back 24/7. In a way, he created his own prison.
      • Life is not a Disney movie. The bad guys often win.
        • Holy Crap? really? Yeah, in my 65 years I have learned at least one thing, and in this case, it seems the bad guys win most of the time. One hopes for people to be better, but.... They fail me regularly, hence my sig.

      • Charlie Ergen wasn't the CEO. He was the owner of Dish. The billions of dollars that he has spent on Dish's wireless rollout came out of his own equity. At one point he was worth over $18 billion dollars.

        Charlie's stake in Dish is essentially wiped out, and unless his wireless play pans out with what is left of Echostar he will have taken a fortune worth billions of dollars and turned it into a crappy 4th rate wireless carrier that no one uses.

        Don't get me wrong, it's not like Charlie is likely to en

        • Well, isn't that interesting. I switched to Dish because of shenanigans by DirecTV, and then after a couple of years, I discontinued Dish because they started pulling the same shenanigans.

          • The shenanigans are real, but they probably don't stem from the place that you suspect. Most of the money that the cable operators bring in as revenue end up going to the content providers. I used to work for SlingTV, and it was priced so that the package just barely covered the cost of programming. Every time the current contract is up the programmers ask for more money. At one point SlingTV lost access to Univision. Their viewership had dropped 30% since they had negotiated their contract, and they w

    • "Charlie (think I'm joking? He sat behind doors with armed guards at the office)." Because he was afraid that the workers he mistreated might come back, armed to do you know what. So he basically left his other employees to take the bullet for what he did. Evil indeed.

  • Is true that merging both companies lowers satellite launch and maintenance costs, and provides leverage vis-a-vis content proviers.

    But the meat and potatoes of the merger is 5G. Due to financial (dis)stress, Dish was not able to deploy their 5G-NR-NC (i.e. Full 5G no bullshit) network fast enough. And, lets face it, in the long run, 5G and 6G will bring in more money, and allow interactivity with SatTV which currently both DTV and Dish sorely lack...

    The Added financial resources + Savings + efficencies/sin

  • Funny thing (Score:3)

    by sjames ( 1099 ) on Monday September 30, 2024 @02:33PM (#64829089) Homepage Journal

    Just a year ago DirecTV was rending garments saying they just HAD to hike prices again and again to stay solvent, now they're taking on a bunch of debt.

    I ditched them and now pay a little under 1/3rd as much per month for streaming.

    Even when I told the retention person the exact monthly they would have to beat to keep me as a customer, they didn't even get close.

    So now DirecTV has more debt and a slightly larger pool of customers preparing to jump ship.

  • Directv is giving up on satellites (Score:3)

    by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Monday September 30, 2024 @03:04PM (#64829175)

    I read a news article a while ago that they stopped launching new satellites, even cancelling a launch that was planned
    If you go to the DTV site, it features their internet streaming service, with satellite far less prominent, labelled "legacy"

    • Same sort of thing happening with Sky here in the UK.

      It's a mistake really as satellites are funded by the channels and broadcasters plus some of the cost from the customers subscriptions. However by switching to using the internet they push most of the distribution costs onto the consumers instead. Saves them money basically. Now the consumers will face the bigger bills for fatter broadband pipes and ISP infrastructure that results, none of those sorts of costs existed with radio waves. The cost of bui

  • I heard that a bunch of people left DirecTV years ago due to some glitch during a football game. :)

  • Oh, are they still doing this? Didn't know (Score:3)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Monday September 30, 2024 @03:36PM (#64829307) Journal
    You mean there's still such a thing as 'satellite TV'? Would've thought that would've died out years ago, when people started cancelling cable TV.
    Why would anyone even pay for this in 2024?

  • They're doing this to provide better customer service and lower cost. Don't they all say that? Somehow, it never works out that way.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jjhall ( 555562 )

      It totally worked for the XM and Sirius radio mergers! They definitely kept their promises of no rate increases. /s

  • I buy that for an dollar!

  • Repubs will rubber stamp this. Dems will killi tfor the anti consumer move it is.

    LET BAD COMPANIES FAIL. Cable tv isn't an essential service.

  • Yeah, they may delay the inevitable, but as soon as all the 70-80-year-olds pass away, their business is over. My 68-year-old neighbors recently canceled all of their cable and satellite services when they got Google Fiber and switched to all streaming services and YT-TV. So, even the old folks are cutting the cord.

  • I've been thinking of upgrading from terrestrial TV to terrestrial TV+satellite. My house (in the UK) came with a dish, moved in 12 years ago. The dish is pointed to some euro sattellites but it worked last time I gave it a test.

    Just need to climb the ladder and redirect it to Astra.

    Then can have Freesat and Freeview, but I could get Sky. Now, Sky would try and push their streaming service: Sky Glass at me. But now we are at peak streaming, well I got there early as having Prime and Netflix and NowTV (a

  • Dish was my favorite of the two, although I never used them. They offered commercial skip and DVR at a much better rate and ended up getting sued over it. DirectTV pissed me off by charging me $200 for a box that was apparently just a rental, when they tried to charge me an additional $600 for it when the contract ended. A decent PC didn't even cost that much. Cable/Satellite went obsolete far before streaming appeared to a lot of people, mostly due to piracy which was more convenient and on your own terms.

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