Dish Hopes To Add Content to Sling; Broadcast Remains in Limbo
A year after launching its Sling TV over-the-top service, Dish Network continues to look for additional channels, and plans a user interface upgrade. "Twenty channels was pretty easy," CEO Charlie Ergen said in a conference call on Q4 results replayed Thursday. "When you're looking through 80 or 90, you need something better." Ergen said Dish "would still like to have two to three other content providers participating" on Sling and is "working closely" to find them -- the pitch being incremental customer and advertising growth.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
Ergen said efforts to add broadcast network content to Sling have been stymied somewhat by rights disagreements between affiliates and networks: "Whether we would need to go to the affiliate and have an individual deal or whether the network itself could speak for the affiliates is unclear to us at this point and I think affiliates and [networks] all have different opinions." The same challenge faces other OTT providers, he said, saying CBS seems "less inclined" to make OTT deals since it has its own All Access OTT service.
For 2015, Dish's pay-TV average monthly subscriber churn was 1.71 percent, versus 1.59 percent in 2014. Ergen blamed the increase on removal of some programming and past discounting practices that were "maybe not the wisest decisions." At introductory pricing offerings of $19.99 monthly and up, he said "you're just not going to get an economical customer at those levels." The company has since shed that pricing structure so most new customers start at $60 per month and up, and most of the churn due to discount customers likely will finish up this year, Ergen said: Churn rates then could improve somewhat, though few new households in the U.S. are opting for cable or satellite. "If they have OTT options and they are younger, they're just going to go to Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and hopefully people like Sling TV and others," he said.
Dish also said it was considering taking part in the March broadcast incentive auction (see 1602180051). While the company doesn't have plans for the spectrum it currently owns, fixed wireless likely won't be among them, said Ergen. "The thing that's particularly nice about the mid-band spectrum we have, it's probably the most versatile out there," Ergen said. "It can be used in small cells and macro cells." While the 28 GHz, 38 GHz and 60 GHz bands will get considerable attention in coming years for wireless and broadband applications, Ergen said "they can't do more than small cell or backhaul. What we have is the most versatile in terms of a wide variety." And while Dish spectrum could be used for fixed wireless applications, he said, "I'm not sure if that's the best use of it."
Some long-term lease to Verizon remains the most-likely outcome of the Dish-held spectrum, New Street Research analyst Jonathan Chaplin wrote investors. Dish is unlikely to deploy the spectrum it holds "for some purpose that under-realizes its value," and the company doesn't face serious time constraints on monetizing the spectrum because the FCC can't reclaim any until at least 2020 if Dish misses build-out targets, he said.
Dish hopes Local Choice -- the broadcast a la carte proposal from Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, R-S.D. -- will be reintroduced, Ergen said: "We think it's great because it ensures that the stations that are important to consumers will remain up for those consumers."