(EDITOR’S NOTE: The auto schedule thing for TVWriter™ failed, so this post is – OMG! – late. Apologies for a screw-up in the order here that nobody would’ve noticed if we hadn’t just told you. So:)
Another look at cord-cutting, from a wider POV:
by Andy Meek
Dish Network announced today [Feb 12, 2019] that it shed 334,000 subscribers during the fourth quarter, with a substantial portion of the departures being attributed to the ongoing dispute with HBO that’s caused HBO programming to be blacked out for Dish subscribers.
If that wasn’t enough, Dish president and CEO Erik Carlson added that there’s been essentially no progress in talks with HBO over the blackout — the first in Dish’s almost 50-year history, which likely spooked many subscribers to go ahead and cancel especially with April’s season 8 premiere of Game of Thrones getting closer and closer.
It must surely sting to run a subscriber-based business and have to tell investors, at a time when everyone is aware that less expensive and more convenient options are eating away at your business, that you lost more than a quarter of a million customers during a single quarter. But things are indeed really that bad for traditional cable TV providers — and new fourth quarter and full-year 2018 figures for the biggest providers show that things are only getting worse….