Yes, this is good because it seems, IMHO, that Charlie is doing this so that he can focus his efforts on Dish Network as that is the company that really needs his day-to-day attention, at the moment. He has got to return some of Dish's luster. The last quarter was good news, but there is a lot more to be accomplished. It will be like the old days when James DeFranco was running the Echostar part of the business (then a division and not a separate company) so that Charlie could be 100% on Dish Network when things were quite desperate in those early years. It was Ergan's running Dish day-to-day that allowed Dish to grow tremendously, and his absence from Dish day-to-day when he was off arranging the Dish/Echo split that was when Dish began its slide.
IMHO, the Dish/Echostar split was made so that when the time comes to sell Dish Network, it would be far more desirable because a potential buyer would not really want the Echostar part of the business and the additional cost to acquire Echostar part of the same company. The creation of Echostar as a separate company also gives Ergan a company of his own to go to and run (in complete control) when he sells Dish Network.
Ergan has been very candid over the years that at some point he would either have to buy a really big media company or sell Dish Network because Dish is too small to effectively compete against the deep-pocketed media conglomerates. Even Echostar is having a very tough time competing with the much larger satellite operating companies, and Ergan admitted this in the last quarterly conference call.
When the Disney/Comcast merger was speculated a few years ago, Ergan said, "Either I write a big check to someone, or someone writes me a big check, and I'm on down the road." The Comcast/NBC Universal merger is BAD for Dish Network because the new combined media company's leverage will be MASSIVE, and Dish is not deep-pocketed enough to keep up in the long run with such large media conglomerates. But, Charlie has to fix the problems at Dish to make it a far more attractive purchase to whoever buys it, should he sell.
Unless the economy changes big-time really soon to allow Ergan to gather the financing (a package of loans from multiple banks) to buy a big media company, it will be just a matter of time before Ergan has to sell, and he knows it. That would be sad, I think, because much of the innovation and re-focus on customer service is Charlie. I can only imagine one of the big media companies treating customers worse and getting rid of good upgrades, etc. In other words, a lot of what we like about Dish Network, and you can forget about competition on price. New owners would probably follow the Direct TV model of higher monthly rates.