Just read an
interesting analysis of the whole DISH/T-Mobile/Sprint saga by Roger Entner, the founder of Recon Analytics, a firm specializing in research and analysis of the telecom industry. He's been around awhile, writing and speaking. The whole article is interesting, although most of it isn't pertinent to this thread about DISH's satellite TV business. But one bit is, and I found it surprising. I'll quote it here, emphasis mine:
Ultimately, Dish could be an aggressive competitor similar to what it is in satellite. Dish competes on price and features with good customer service. Unfortunately, at the current trajectory, the satellite business will become unprofitable in about three years as subscribers, revenue and profit are declining precipitously. The underlying profitability of Dish’s core satellite business, capital intensity of wireless, the hyper-competitiveness of the wireless industry, the vagaries of international politics, delays in technical standards, the fickleness of investors, and plain old execution risks are the biggest complicating factors in Dish becoming successful in wireless.
So an industry expert is saying that DISH's satellite TV business will be a money-loser by end of 2022. Wow. I'm a little more bearish on the future of satellite TV than some but I still thought that DISH and/or DirecTV (or, more likely, a combined "DishDirect" operation) could maintain profitable operations until at least 2025, perhaps until 2030, given the longevity of their combined satellite fleet, which includes DirecTV's just-launched T-16 bird.
That 2022 timeframe rings a bell. There's a guy who posts on this site over on the DirecTV side (can't recall his name) and he's a former DirecTV employee and remains in touch with engineers who still work there. He claims that they're making internal plans and shifts in resources, etc. that are suggestive of some kind of big downshift in the whole operation in the next few years, around that 2022 timeframe, IIRC.
If either or both of those guys (Entner or the former DTV employee) know what they're talking about, we may very well be looking at some kind of joint operating agreement between DTV and DISH quite soon. The biggest thing that could allow satellite TV to lengthen the window of time that it could operate profitably would be to create some sort of non-aggression pact with your only direct competitor (if not outright eliminate them) by merging or forming some sort of cooperative joint venture. And of course, such a move would also restore some lost scale and help bring down per-subscriber operating costs -- once operations were combined, lots of employees in customer service, installation, billing, etc. could be laid off.
