Dish Network Corp. (DISH) founder Charlie Ergen said he may permanently drop Time Warner Inc.
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For weather that's what I do too.
For news, I just listen in the car as I'm driving somewhere. If the trip is more than 20 minutes long, I'll get to hear the same story more than once!
That depends. In general of course you don't want to lose subs. But Charlie has said what people that know business say. When things are bad you only need customers who pay. (When times are good you can afford to keep others that may pay off in the end) From my personal experience of what DISH has offered me and what I see others post, some percentage of those that leave were not enticed to stay. Either they owe money or are always late. Also possible they are subs with the Welcome package, not a money maker or some perpetually switch to get new customer discounts. Charlie has said they were willing to lose subs to end up with those who pay their bill. And DISH is doing better than Cable at this point meaning the business climate is not good so losing some subs is going to happen with or without certain channels.
That does not mean the future will remain the same, I see trouble for DISH not over these channels at all, but over TNT/TBS/O&O CBS. It would be better IMHO to pay a little more than DISH may like to keep those.
The forecast was to add 10k, they lost 20k. I think probably most of the ones lost were over the dispute.
For incentives, I got $10/month x6 months. And Cinemax/Starz for a month. It's getting about time to call and get some more incentives. I am out of contract and currently subbed to the Dish 250 and Multi-Sport package.
We put Dish on hold except for football season. And my wife loves CNN. Ironic that we get Dish back and a few months in she loses her favorite program.
For incentives, I got $10/month x6 months. And Cinemax/Starz for a month. It's getting about time to call and get some more incentives. I am out of contract and currently subbed to the Dish 250 and Multi-Sport package.
We put Dish on hold except for football season. And my wife loves CNN. Ironic that we get Dish back and a few months in she loses her favorite program.
This is a pretty good point. Just because Dish has 14 million customers does not mean that they are all good customers. There are a ton of crappy customers out there. Customers that are stacking accounts, not paying bills, have super old equipment and the lowest package, try do get discounts every chance they get...... These are not profitable customers and I'm sure Dish has no issues letting them go.
We are up to week 3 now with my daughter not being able to watch her favorite shows (seriously, she DRVed 4 shows and watched them over and over) -- so I'm starting to seriously weigh some of my options.
I honestly want to see how well the family manages not having TV, but am not sure I'm ready to fully commit to a complete cancel over this one network (not quite yet). From reading around it looks like I can put my account on 'pause' for $5/month and just keep all equipment in place and leave everything untouched without affecting my subscriber time with dish (which is at 18 years now).
Anyone done a pause before? Any gotchas I need to worry about? Anything that does/doesn't work for me which service is paused?
If nothing else I'm hoping that Dish seeing a (very) long time customer serious enough to consider dropping a service that I'm (generally) happy with means this particular outage isn't a 'non event' per Charlie's words.
I honestly want to see how well the family manages not having TV, but am not sure I'm ready to fully commit to a complete cancel over this one network (not quite yet). From reading around it looks like I can put my account on 'pause' for $5/month and just keep all equipment in place and leave everything untouched without affecting my subscriber time with dish (which is at 18 years now).
Anyone done a pause before? Any gotchas I need to worry about? Anything that does/doesn't work for me which service is paused?
If nothing else I'm hoping that Dish seeing a (very) long time customer serious enough to consider dropping a service that I'm (generally) happy with means this particular outage isn't a 'non event' per Charlie's words.
You're going to switch providers just because your daughter can't watch some cartoons? I understand that can be a pain but she's just a kid and they change their interests all the time. I'm not saying this to mean, I have a child as well and he changes his favorite show at least once a month. There are so many other channels with cartoons on that I'm sure you could find something she likes. This is one of the reasons why my DVR is half full of just my son's favorite shows so I always have something on he wants to watch. If that's not enough for him then he can play with his toys are find something better to do. There would need to be something much bigger than that to make me switch. I would use your instance as a way to get some kind of discounts from Dish though.
If you wanted to pause, it is simple. It is only $5 per month, for up to 9 months, and you puse everything. This includes DVR recordings, however some people have been lucky and able to watch them while on pause. But basically, just every single thing about the account pauses until 9 months passes, or you call to remove it off pause.
If still under contract it also pauses. If you had 3 months left on your Dish contract and you paused for 6 months, you would still have 3 months left when you took the account off pause.
Just curious, what value does subscriber time have? Seems like every business I deal with gives more consideration to new customers than old.
Nah, you misunderstand what I'm leaning towards here a bit: I've been wanting to drop providers entirely -- move to online for the few shows I care about. I think.
For our current Dish set up my youngest daughter really is the person who watches the majority of TV (not a bad parent comment: which actually isn't that much per day, but at least daily). She watches enough TV that I didn't mind keeping Dish around for the DVR convenience of the few shows I care about myself. So the loss of this one channel that is (was) 90% of her TV viewing makes it easier for me to cut the cord on her (my wife and oldest daughter probably wouldn't noticed it was gone for months).
I'm ready to save $120 a month for something 1.5 of us utilize, and 3 weeks without her favorite shows is making it really easy for this to be the impetus to take the next step. Believe it or not that one channel is the straw breaking the camels back.
I'm just pondering a pause for a few months to make sure I or my family don't end up missing something we do actually care about. I actually really like the HW set up, and every now and then will get in a TV watching mood. But I'm betting I won't miss it after it is gone.
.. I think ..
Beleive it or not, a lot of benefit is given to old customers, that are profitable. They will get much higher discounts when available, and things like tech visits are easier to waive. You're not going to get NC credits your entire account history time, but you are going to fair getting things like $25 and even $50 credits a lot easier. I remember one call, when I was first promoted as a supervisor, I absolutely would not give this guy a $200 credit plus a $50/12. He was adamant about it. Had been with the company for 15 years. My manager happened to be standing there, and took over, overrode me, and applied all the discounts plus gave him some movie channels and PPV coupons without him even asking. He told me afterwards that with a customer of that legacy, dish will do just about anything, and he was completely ok with doing it. I was shocked, and that was enough proof for me that old customers are taken care of.
I have to be honest, Dish has done very right by me over the years in upgrading hardware without commitments and honoring some pretty decent programming deals when I called because of my tenure. I just talk to a service rep and mention my time with the company and 9 times out of 10 whatever offer I call about is opened up to me without extending my commitment.
Might also help I don't call and asking for something special monthly or anything crazy, just every few years, usually when something really cool HW wise changes.
If it is a couple months after the initial release of some super hardware(HWS) it is so much easier to waive those fees off. If it is the same day release, there is just so little in stock it is nearly impossible. When the hopper first released, a lot of the initial hardware costs was to deter people from upgrading until they could build up an inventory. Unfortunately, myself included, it didn't help much. Lol.
Dish has done a great job of taking care of me over the years but I've had high level programming, high level equipment, auto pay, paperless billing and refer a lot of customers to them. I get very peeved at the people who have been with Dish for only three to four years thinking they have been with Dish forever and are entitled to new customer discounts.
How do I get in on that deal?
I've been with Dish since May 2000. I was miffed when they nixed all of the regional sports nets in the NYC market, but didn't cry too hard as I only watched them sporadically. My Mets have been awful since Madoff robbed their piggy bank and they slashed payrolls 60% so SNY going away was less painful than it would have been if they had been good the last few years.
But losing CNN and Cartoon Network are deal breakers. Mostly for Robot Chicken on TOON and CNN which hurts. I had to keep bouncing between MSNBC and FoxNews on election night and the partisan nonsense made them unwatchable. The broadcast nets only had national news that night from 10pm-11pm, and I really missed it. Now I hear CBS may be next, as Charlie tries to play hardball again. After 14.5 years, I am seriously considering ditching them for Fios. I have them for phone and internet already and it would be cheaper to switch to them. The only thing slowing me down is my archived hard drive content. I have a ton of content that I still watch occasionally. I am waiting for the TNT negotiations as I expect this to be resolved around then. If not, I will be switching.
But losing CNN and Cartoon Network are deal breakers. Mostly for Robot Chicken on TOON and CNN which hurts. I had to keep bouncing between MSNBC and FoxNews on election night and the partisan nonsense made them unwatchable. The broadcast nets only had national news that night from 10pm-11pm, and I really missed it. Now I hear CBS may be next, as Charlie tries to play hardball again. After 14.5 years, I am seriously considering ditching them for Fios. I have them for phone and internet already and it would be cheaper to switch to them. The only thing slowing me down is my archived hard drive content. I have a ton of content that I still watch occasionally. I am waiting for the TNT negotiations as I expect this to be resolved around then. If not, I will be switching.
Dish pause don't stop you from watching your recorded show..nor does it delete timers. FP is available also.