Dish Network CEO Ergen: 'We're just not getting our fair share yet'

Dish Network (Nasdaq: DISH) CEO Charlie Ergen said his company must rely on more than selling a standalone satellite TV service to compete, but emphasized on a call with Wall Street analysts Monday that new products such as the company's wireless broadband business will take time to  grow.

Ergen

"If we're in the video business, we need to be more than fixed. We need to be mobile video as well. The wireless spectrum that we're attempting to acquire allows us to be able to do that," Ergen said on Dish Network's third-quarter earnings call Monday afternoon. Ergen was referring to the company's hopes to market new wireless broadband Internet and video services through wireless spectrum it has agreed to acquire from TerreStar Networks and DBSD North America.

While Dish Network lost 135,000 subscribers during the third quarter, CEO Joseph Clayton said the company was "cautiously optimistic" about subscriber growth in the fourth quarter, pointing to current subscriber promotions. And while Ergen emphasized the need for Dish to expand beyond its core satellite offering through, he remained bullish about the future of the company's satellite TV offering.

"I think there's still business out there in satellite, still the most efficient way to deliver video. We're just not getting our fair share yet," Ergen said.

Also worth noting from Dish's Q3 earnings call.

• Ergen said he expects the FCC to approve the company's acquisitions of TerreStar and DBSD North America, and noted that while Dish will create jobs with its wireless broadband venture, rivals AT&T (NYSE: T) and T-Mobile will cut jobs through their merger.
• Ergen predicted that one of the major pay TV providers may attempt to differentiate itself one day by not offering sports programming, noting that only 20 percent of consumers are sports fans. "In theory, their cost could be cut by half to the consumer," Ergen said, noting that sports networks are the most expensive license deals for pay TV providers.
• Pointing to reports that Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) traffic comprises one-third of the data that is streamed to a home, Ergen said net neutrality is crucial and he suggested that usage-based billing for high-speed Internet services could hurt online video providers. "The Achilles' heel potentially of streaming video is that the advent of bit buckets and the limits on the number of bits you can stream, and then your price goes up," Ergen said.

For more:
- see transcript from the Dish earnings call

Earnings summary: Sizing up the cable industry in Q3 2011

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