News
Dish Bashes AMC; Adds 104,000 Subs In Q1
By Swanni 

Washington, D.C. (May 8, 2012) -- Dish Network yesterday reported that it added 104,000 net subscribers in the first quarter, better than the 62,000 estimate from Wall Street analysts.

The satcaster said net income fell to $360 million in the quarter, compared to $549 million a year ago. But revenue jumped 11 percent to $3.6 billion.

Dish also said subscriber churn fell to 1.35 percent in the first quarter compared to 1.47 percent in the 2011 first quarter. The company now has 14.071 million subscribers.

In the last financial quarter, the satcaster added 22,000 net subscribers.

DIRECTV is scheduled to release its first quarter report on Tuesday.

Following the release of its first quarter report, Dish held a conference call with Wall Street analysts during which Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen slammed AMC for allowing its programming to be accessed on Internet services such as Netflix, iTunes and Amazon. The satcaster is threatening to remove AMC and three sister networks at the end of June over a carriage fee dispute and Ergen said yesterday that the networks are not worth the money in part because their programming is so easily available elsewhere.,

"Those particular channels are also available to our customers through a variety of other sources like iTunes, Amazon and Netflix and so forth and so on. So one of the things that programmers have done is they've devalued their programming content by making it available in many multiple outlets," Ergen said.

The Dish chief added: "You can get it multiple ways and customers are asking for more flexibility or have more flexibility to get the programming, so it's not quite the same if something was exclusive."