Dish Drops CNN

[Émile]

Dish Drops CNN: “The World Is Changing. Some People Are Going To Change With It.”
"When we take something down we’re prepared to leave it down forever. Things like CNN are not quite the product that they used to be.

Dish Network Chairman Charlie Ergen was in rare form today in his quarterly earnings conference call with analysts and media — especially when asked about his battle with Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting. All of its channels except for TBS and TNT went dark on the No. 2 satellite company on October 21 as a result of a contract dispute. And Ergen says he’s prepared to dig in his heels, including doing without CNN which he says is “not a top 10 network anymore. Unless they find the Malaysian plane.” His comments were so interesting that I’ve decided to include big blocks of them, instead of summarizing. Here you go:
He’s prepared to do without Turner:

When we take something down we’re prepared to leave it down forever. Things like CNN are not quite the product that they used to be. You can imagine: CNN down on election night would have been a disaster 15 or 20 years ago. Now there are plenty of other places for people to get news. In fact a lot of people get news not from TV but from their devices. So it’s not had a major impact on our business yet. I do expect that we would ultimately lose some subscribers without Turner programming. We would prefer to get a deal done. But we have a timeframe that we look at and there comes a point in time, certainly during this month, if we don’t have a deal [then] we just make a long-term decision to go a different direction.

How the Turner dispute reflects broader trends:

The industry is changing…There are about 10 big programming groups – I don’t anticipate that the cable companies, satellite companies and phone companies are going to carry the same 10 groups. It’s not going to be a marketplace where everybody has the exact same thing and it’s just about price. Some [will lean] more towards family and kids, some more toward sports, some more towards entertainment.

http://deadline.com/2014/11/dish-networks-charlie-ergen-loss-cnn-turner-channels-nonevent-1201273061/

[CODYQX4]

Not that I like CNN, but Dish sucks and they are just dropping everything to save money.

[Enigmatism]

Not that I like CNN, but Dish sucks and they are just dropping everything to save money.

CNN has lost all credibility. They will now go the way of the dinosaur.