Free Republic

The Justice Department took the rare step earlier this month of moving to dismiss a $3.3 billion civil fraud lawsuit against Dish Network — months after founder Charlie Ergen and his wife donated more than $113,000 to President Biden’s re-election campaign late last year. Ergen, a former professional poker player who helped launch what was then called EchoStar Communications in 1980, has battled the federal fraud claim for nearly a decade. But the Tennessee native saw his luck change shortly after he and spouse Candy contributed $100,000 to Biden’s super PAC and maxed out with matching $6,600 donations to the...

Dish Network reported that it lost about 552,000 net pay TV subscribers in the first quarter, compared with a decline of 462,000 in the year-ago period and a drop of 268,000 in the fourth quarter of 2022. ...That includes 7.09 million Dish TV customers and 2.1 million Sling TV subscribers, which faces stiff competition from YouTube TV, Hulu+ Live TV and fuboTV.

A Toyota Prius driver who affixed a Starlink dish in the middle of his car's hood was ticketed by the California Highway Patrol on Friday. 'Sir I stopped you today for that visual obstruction on your hood. Does it not block your view while driving?' the officer asked, according to a post on CHP Antelope Valley’s Facebook page. 'Only when I make right turns...' the driver cheekily replied.

We are done with FOX with few exceptions. I didn't know Dish had Newsmax. We are loving it. There is an active petition to get OANN onto the Dish Network too which would be great. If they don't get it soon, I will probably go with Spectrum which has both Newsmax and OANN.

NEW YORK (AP) — A high-drama telecom deal is heading to court. T-Mobile, in its attempt to buy Sprint for $26.5 billion, has already notched approvals from key federal regulators. Now it must convince a federal judge that the 14 state attorneys general suing to stop the deal are wrong. A trial starts Monday in U.S. District Court in New York and is expected to last several weeks. If T-Mobile prevails, the number of major U.S. wireless companies would shrink to three from four. A combined T-Mobile-Sprint would become a fiercer competitor to larger Verizon and AT&T . But the...

I've seen this enough times now to know that it is not an accident. Last night we were watching FOX News and during a segment featuring Greg Gutfeld they cut to commercial. After one more or less benign commercial who comes on but Lester Holt advertising for NBC News. An ad for NBC News on FOX News? Whut??? But like I said, I've seen this before. So right after the ad finishes I click the reverse on our DISH Hopper to replay the ad and instead of the NBC ad it's an ad for the 2020 Trump campaign. DISH ran...

The top 11 U.S. pay TV operators lost 2.87 million customers in 2018, nearly double the 1.5 million the domestic ecosystem shed in 2017. These are the latest quarterly findings by Leichtman Research Group (LRG), which measures the leading operators covering 95% of the U.S. market. The big negative drivers were the two satellite TV companies, DirecTV and Dish Network, which lost a ton of customers on the linear side, but this time couldn’t make up for it with gains by their low-margin virtual pay TV services. The two satellite carriers lost a combined 2.36 million linear customers in 2018,...

It just became a bit harder to watch Spanish-language TV in the US, whether or not it's online. Dish and Sling TV have lost a trio of Univision stations (including its main channel, UniMás and Galavisión) after the two failed to end a carriage pricing dispute before a contract ended. Dish insisted that Univision was "drastically" raising rates to make up for declining viewership, charging "almost double" for Dish and Sling customers as it was for Univision Now. It even took to offering free over-the-air antennas to viewers in some regions to win them over. Meanwhile, Univision framed Dish's demands...

Nearly 3 million Dish Network subscribers in 18 cities, including Los Angeles, have lost access to their local CBS television station — just two days before Thanksgiving, when many Americans want to watch NFL football. The blackout comes amid a contentious fee dispute between satellite TV provider Dish Network and CBS Corp., which owns the television stations. Customers in New York, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, Miami, San Francisco, Denver and other markets also were hit by the blackout, which in addition to the local stations includes three CBS cable channels: CBS Sports Network, Smithsonian Channel and Pop. Dish has nearly 400,000...

I need some cable cutting help. Years ago, we got Dish network, which I am now dumping. I got Sling TV and a Roku box, which works great. I plan/hope to get local channels through a new antenna. I disconnected Dish and mounted and connected my new Channelmaster 45, right where my old antenna was. I live in the burbs, only a few miles from the major broadcast antenna and before we switched to Dish, the old antenna pulled in numerous channels. With the new Channelmaster, I only get a few channels (for you MN folks, I get TPT public...

I am currently in the process of ditching Dish satellite cable and switching to all online. Part of my motivation is to defund CNN et al. and part because it is really expensive. My Dish DVR has a lot of movies on it I would like to save. They are (apparently) in Linux format. I can transfer the movies to a flash drive OK, but then I cannot read the flash drive on any other computer (all Windows).Can anyone tell me how I can save these movies so I can watch them in the future? My online search only talked...

I've seen several posts here about cable cutting and thought I'd chime in and rant. I have been considering cutting the cable and am salivating over switching to Sling or PlayStation Vue. I already have Kodi. Content isn't the problem, internet is the problem (though my Dish bill has skyrocket over the years). My DSL from CenturyLink has increased 75% over the past few years. I have the fastest speed they offer in my area, a blistering 5 mbps, though I am paying for their 12 mbps service, which isn't available because they haven't laid the fiber optic in my...

Dish Network Corp. lost a record number of TV subscribers in the second quarter as programming blackouts and price increases drove customers to seek cheaper online alternatives, reviving industrywide concerns about “cord-cutting.” Dish shed 281,000 pay-TV customers in the quarter, compared with a loss of 81,000 a year earlier, according to a statement from the Englewood, Colorado-based company Thursday. That marks the biggest loss of TV subscribers in any quarter. The rate of monthly customer defections, or churn, rose to 1.96 percent from 1.71 percent a year earlier, Dish said in a separate filing.

Cancelled DishTV today. I have "cut the cord" on and off for many years, and it's time again. I was paying $60/month on a discount plan and it went up to $120 for the same programming. I'm just not getting that kind of benefit from the cable channels. On a personal level, I don't see the value. A recent article found that more than 1,000,000 [US] consumers cancelled paid TV subscriptions in 2015, according to SNL Kagan, a division of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Last year's decline was four times greater than the losses of 2014, and it represents the...

U.S. satellite TV provider Dish Network Corp reported quarterly revenue below analysts' estimates as it lost more subscribers than expected in its core pay-TV business. The company lost 23,000 net pay-TV subscribers in the quarter, more than the analysts' average estimate of a loss of 13,100 customers.. ... Dish, which is grappling with subscriber losses like other pay-TV providers, has been increasing rates

I had occasion to call my cable provider (DISH) yesterday, and while talking to them I asked when they would start carrying "One America News". The rep had obviously never heard of it, so had him send the request to their programming department. All to say this, they obviously need a flood of request to pick up OAN, it would be nice if Freeper with DISH, looking for a conservative news source to replace Faux News, would call them and just request, or even demand it. Their number is 1-800-333-3474. I've been on FR for a long time, but have...

Update on cutting cable and Dish

FOX News Channel and FOX Business Network are back on DISH! Thank you for your patience and support!

One look at the political history of Dish Network founder and Chairman Charles Ergen places the idea that the network dropped Fox News over a simple contract dispute in serious doubt. Since Dec. 20, when the Dish network dropped Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network, the former has lost about 90,000 subscribers. The Media Research Center’s Dan Joseph decided to take a look at OpenSecrets documents revealing Ergen’s political donations from last year, which immediately raised some red flags. Ergen donated a total of $64,000 to the Democratic Senatorial campaign Committee, according to the report. As Joseph writes, Ergen’s donating record obviously doesn’t prove he...

I switched to Dish from Comcast about three months ago. Dumb. I was hoping to save some money and don’t care for Comcast’s politics. I knew satellites have some reception problems during storms, but was willing to live with that. I had no idea they would drop the only channel worth watching on television. Now, I don’t like everything about Fox. Sean Hannity is too strident for my tastes, and Bill O’Reilly is a blowhard bully, but I’m less interested in the prime-time programming than in the daytime news, now that I’m retired and at home most days. Of course,...