Englewood, Colo. –
reported Monday an increase in third-quarter sales from the same
period a year ago but another decline in subscriber totals.
The satellite TV provider said sales increased 2 percent to $3.6
billion, but the service lost 111,000 subscribers in the period.
The subscriber declines came a few days after rival satellite TV
service DirecTV reported a 327,000 subscriber increase. At the end of the
period, on Sept. 30, the satellite TV service listed approximately 13.945
million total U.S. subscribers.
Dish’s net income for the period increased 30 percent to $319
million, from $245 million a year earlier.
“Dish delivered another quarter of
strong growth in net income compared to the same period last year,” stated Joe
Clayton, Dish Network president and CEO. “Our net subscriber loss
improved over the second quarter of this year but continued to be affected by
increased competitive pressures, including aggressive competitive promotional
offers, discounting and a weak housing market. Going forward, we plan to build
on the momentum of our introduction of the Blockbuster-branded programming
service which allows Dish customers to stream movies and TV shows as well as
receive DVDs by mail.”
Company chairman Charlie Ergen, who also heads sister company
EchoStar, purchased Blockbuster, DBSD North America and TerreStar Networks this
year, with plans to expand into new services including Internet video for
mobile devices.
Moving closer to completing those acquisitions, Dish said Friday
it will pay Sprint Nextel $114 million to settle a dispute over its separate purchases
last summer of DBSD North America and TerreStar out of bankruptcy.
The acquisitions still need Federal Communications Commission approvals.
Sprint claimed it was owned $104 million in bandwidth fees from TerreStar
and DBSD. Dish said the new settlement ends the litigation and Sprint withdrew
its petitions to deny Dish the right to use the new spectrum it was seeking to
acquire.
TerreStar has been working on developing the first
satellite-based smartphone.
