A sunk cost is something you've already paid for, or committed to pay for. If you look at earnings only from the perspective of FASB accounting, where you include soft costs like depreciation and amortization (and ignoring checks you write for principal balances on debt) you aren't seeing the whole picture. You also need to look at cash flow, where depreciation and amortization are irrelevant, but principle balance paydown on debt will be included. Any business owner knows if you show an accounting profit but have negative cash flow you aren't going to last long (this doesn't really apply to big companies like AT&T who can borrow billions, but try running a negative cash balance for multiple years as a small business owner and you won't get far) You would much rather own a business that shows an accounting loss but has a positive cash flow - in fact that's the best kind of business to own because you are adding money to your bank account and getting a tax writeoff (a lot of real estate businesses end up like this, due to their favorable tax treatment)
Anyway, those satellites cost a lot less than you might think when amortized for their whole life across all Directv's customers. I've posted these calculations several times before, but here we go again. Directv has never to my knowledge posted information about how much they paid to build/launch a satellite, but there is information out there for similar satellites, so let's say they cost $400 million to build/launch. Directv needs a fleet of five in the long run (T11, T12, T14, T15 and the to-be-launched-later-this-year T16) since they are not going to use 95/110/119 after this year. That implies a cost of $2 billion if they were going to start from scratch. They have an operational lifetime of around 20 years (they are built for 15 years, but always overbuilt and some last much longer - for example the D8 satellite recently semi-retired at 101 was launched in 2005 and Directv estimates it has fuel life until 2034, so they will probably keep it as an in orbit spare at 101 in case of catastrophe)
Anyway $2 billion for 20 years means they amortize at a rate of $100 million a year (I don't know what the IRS has them depreciate as on a tax basis, consult your local accountant
) Currently they have just under 20 million subscribers so that means each subscriber pays a grand total of $5/year for the cost of building/launching Directv's satellite fleet, or less than 50 cents a month. Now obviously as subscribers leave the per customer charge goes up, but even if they lost 80% of their subscribers and were down to 4 million that's about $2/month. Those aren't the only costs to operate their satellites, they have their broadcast centers, the equipment in them, their staffing etc. but it would be complete guesswork to try to come up with numbers for those, and a lot of that same stuff is also needed to stream to customers so it would be even further guesswork to determine how much of that to specifically allocate to satellite.
My point is that while satellites look really expensive, you are amortizing those costs over many years and across many customers, so the portion of a subscriber's monthly bill that can be pointed to and say "because satellite" is really pretty small, and while it starts to get larger if they lose a LOT of their satellite subscribers there will be a core group of satellite subscribers who are VERY sticky - because they don't have any other option due to lack of good internet access. Those core subscribers who have no other choice would be forced to accept it if the number of subscribers went down and Directv added a $5 "satellite maintenance surcharge" or whatever to pay for the cost of keeping the lights on until the satellites literally begin to fail. They don't do that now because the true surcharge would be so small, and it would piss off a lot of customers who have plenty of options. But once most of the customers with options have taken those options, they can add a fee like that (or just raise prices for other line items to the same effect)
