During the first six months of 2008 Dish Network added 1.48 million gross new subscribers. During this same period, almost as many Dish Network subscribers churned off the service as were added, leaving Dish Netowrk with only 10,000 net new subscribers in their base of 13.97 million subscribers.
AT&T brought many of these new subscribers and without this new subscriber growth Dish Network would have suffered a net loss of over 200,000 subscribers during the first half of the year.
Their churn rate averaged 1.78% per month and it is attributed to competition, the economy, TV signal theft and operating inefficiencies. Given that these are long-term factors, it will not be easy for Dish Network to reduce churn significantly or to stop the unauthorized signal reception.
DirecTV gained 404,000 net new subscribers during the first six months of 2008, reaching 17.16 million in total.
Dish Network is an innovative company yet they have not taken major steps to curb theft of service and for what it's worth, DirecTV is also far from a success in this area.
We estimate that more than 6 million are receiving unauthorized satellite TV signals in the USA and the legitimate subscribers are paying their bills.
