My favorite part about Dish is the 722K with sling and ext HD plus 2 OTA tuners.
The programming is OK, but I generally only watch Science, Discovery, History channels and CNBC. Never watch CNN so I didn't miss it when it went black. I tune into FoxB at times but since Dish took it down, I fell they should give me a refund. Instead, they want to charge me an increase for taking programming away.
Then I see this CEO, Joe Clayton, come on and over and over tell me FOX hacked into Dish and took the channel down? Is he serious? How insulting! Fox never took that channel down, Dish took their own channel down that carried Fox News and Fox Business. If Fox somehow did break into Dish's uplink center and sabotage the channels, taking their programming off without Dish's permission, then let Dish complain to the FCC and FBI. The truth is, and Clayton knows this, Dish pulled the channel off to coerce Fox into negotiating a lower cost deal for their programming. I recall Charlie never lied about these negotiations. He always told us like it was, that there was a dispute on price and Dish and he wanted the better fees to keep a lower subscription rate.
I suspect Joe Clayton can't say the truth, because the timing of the Fox negotiation is right when he wants to raise our rates. Therefore he lies to use claiming Fox came in and shut the channels down.
This way, regardless of how the dispute is settled, and I'm sure it will be settled, Joe Clayton can have his big fat rate increase and when people say anything he can blame Fox, CNN and the other provider networks for the increase.
Fact is, Dish Network is doing very well as a profitable company. In the last 1.5 years the company's stock is up 110% Does Dish really need the rate increase? I don't think so. They will impose it only because the competition is just a bit more expensive and they know it.
A good sign that a company is considerate of it's customers and it's share holders is, the company doesn't lie to it's customers, and returns some of it's earnings to it's shareholders.
When Charlie was CEO, Dish paid a quarterly dividend and had an annual special dividend as well. When this CEO, Joe Clayton took over, we see the dividend cut to zero! Rate increases on customers backed by outright lies such as this one on TV running right now, frequent popular channel blackouts and then blaming the cause on the vendor. Yet, profits were up despite a loss of 12,000 subscribers per month as reported by one news service during the last quarter.
