History mode.
In the beginning there was OTA TV. Which was fine for city folk. Rural people? At the mercy of crooked, uncaring, truly evil cable bandits.
Then came the BUD. A godsend for rural America. And a way to deliver extra channels to cable systems that then turned their focus to the suburbs. But, being cable, they did the least they could do. Ghosting, grainy, garbage.
Technology advanced and DBS came. The whole concept was designed for rural America. All of its business planing was based on selling to rural America. But something interesting happened. It was so much better than cable that it became the fastest growing consumer technology product in history. Suburban and even urban dwellers dumped cable for the superiority of DBS. For cable it was “death from above”. And so very deserved.
Then came streaming which, for a while, allowed non-sports fans to avoid paying for the sports they don’t want. This appears to be ending. And everyone that wants to be streaming only, already is.
The point? Actually two. The DBS business model works even if it is just a product for rural America. Yes, it was, and remains, a great thing to dominate the market, but it still works out financially just as originally planed, in rural America. And cable, and thus the internet, in rural, and a lot of suburban, America is still garbage. It is what cable is all about. What is the absolute least service we can provide and still get paid for? It is what it is culturally going to do.
Thus, because no one else wants to, or even can, do the job of delivering entertainment to the millions and millions of Americans without access to that level of internet (and the millions more that simply have no use for it) DBS will continue for many decades. Adding in the total inability of streaming to serve the commercial side of things, and the customer base remains viable.
No matter what the ex owners of one of the two systems said.