Rainbow DBS no longer has a sale value. The only "value" is that Dolan Sr would take it off their hands for free (provided he can come up with financing to cover the losses).
from the quarterly results:
The company's bottom line continued to be hurt by its Rainbow DBS unit, which includes Voom. It reported an operating loss of $449.8 million, including $354.9 million in asset write downs.
26,000 customers and they lost $449.8 in one quarter or each "customer" paid lets say $300 for the service or $7.8 million. If you take the write down out they lost $94.9 million dollars or $3,650 PER CUSTOMER.
The bleed rate has gotten so serious now that they can just turn off the whole system and crash R-1 into the earth ground station destroying both and save money after 2 quarters. Yes I know that is not what they would do but it is to illustrate the point.
Right now CVC sees getting back $200,000,000 of the money they are flushing down the toilet from Echostar, and a possible way to prevent the shutdown losses by letting Dolan Sr. take it off his hands.
Dolan Sr sees a way to salvage VOOM by HUGE cost cutting (i.e. lease some cheap Ku-FSS vs paying for an extreamly expensive R-1).
They have now indicated that having a working DBS system is not going to be sold for anything more than scrap. Running free public interest channels on R-1 to keep the frequencies hot until the sale of the satellite would save many millions if the sale of the VOOM assests to Dolan Sr does not go through.
Do you really think the board of CVC really cares about 26,000 angry customers when they would save $100 million per quarter turning them off?
Answer: NO, they voted to turn off the service and sell the assests BEFORE there was an agreement to sell the service to Dolan Sr. They looked at the numbers and saw that even if they get $0 for the assets they would save money soon. VOOM wiped all their profits out and then some last year.
Do you really think that really all the VOOM customers would be really angry? Some will be the other will realize that businesses go out of business and that VOOM was a nice idea but did not make it. I am sure CVC would simply refund any money that people had paid in advance.