Echostar Corporation’s pay television business continued to see a net decline in customers during its third financial quarter (Q3) of the year, weighed mostly by subscriber losses at its traditional satellite-based service Dish Network, the company revealed on Tuesday.
Echostar ended Q3 with 180,000 fewer Dish customers compared to Q2, with the company’s satellite subscriber count now at 5.89 million. Sling TV had a better financial quarter, with the company adding 140,000 customers to end with 2.14 million in total. The figures represented a sequential decrease of nearly 3 percent at Dish and an increase of 7 percent at Sling.
The company’s pay television business earned $2.618 billion during Q3, down from $2.807 billion earned during the same period last year and a decline of slightly more than 2 percent when compared to Q2.
In a statement, Hamid Akhavan focused first on the health of Echostar’s wireless and broadband businesses, before discussing the pay TV company.
“The EchoStar team continued to execute against our plan in the third quarter. Our efforts focused on profitable customer acquisition and retention, strengthening our consumer offerings and enhancing our nationwide Open RAN 5G network,” Akhavan said. “In addition, we recently announced a series of transformative transactions that will disrupt the wireless and pay-TV industries. We secured financing to meet our November debt maturity and announced an agreement with a group of our convertible note holders. This last transaction provides approximately $5.2 billion in additional financing and extends payment terms for the existing convertible notes tendered. In addition, we agreed to sell our pay-TV business to DirecTV, subject to successful completion of an ongoing exchange and other closing conditions.”
On Monday, The Desk and others reported that a group of creditors attributed to Echostar’s Dish Network Corporation subsidiary had rejected an offer for a bond exchange, which is one of the contingencies of the DirecTV deal. It wasn’t clear if the companies had made progress on this offer; a DirecTV spokesperson declined to comment on Tuesday.
In other parts of Echostar’s business, retail wireless subscribers decreased by 297,000, the result of higher churn triggered by the end of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provided federal subsidies that significantly reduced the price of some phone and data plans. Broadband satellite subscribers dipped by 43,000 customers, with the company again pointing to the end of the ACP as the primary reason for the loss.
