EchoStar’s Dish Network continued to see its pay TV base shrink in 2024, contributing to a drag on revenue, but cited year-over-year improvements on other key metrics including churn, ARPU and costs for acquiring subscribers. In the year ahead, executives on Thursday said a focus will be to further integrate and cross-sell video with its Boost Mobile retail wireless and Hughes satellite broadband products.
Dish Q4 and 2024 pay TV subscriber numbers
In Q4 Dish’s net pay TV subscribers – including both virtual MVPD Sling TV and traditional Dish TV - decreased by about 253,000. It’s an improvement compared to the 314,000 net pay TV customers the company lost in the same period a year ago but worse than 43,000 net video subscriber losses in Q3. The company ended 2024 with 7.78 million total pay TV subscribers, down from the approximately 8.53 million it had at the end of 2023. The remaining base includes 5.69 million Dish TV subscribers and 2.09 million Sling TV subscribers.
Sequentially, Dish ended Q4 with about 50,000 fewer Sling TV customers about 200,000 fewer Dish TV customers than at the end of Q3. The company said there were fewer net Dish TV and Sling TV subscriber losses in the period compared to last year due to lower subscriber disconnects in 2024 as a result of its emphasis on acquiring high-quality subscribers.
While declining compared to Q3, over the course of 2024 Sling TV’s subscriber base ticked up slightly from the 2.06 million it ended 2023 with. The traditional Dish TV base continued to contract for the full-year 2024, down from the 6.47 million subscribers it had left at the end of 2023.
Some pay TV metrics improve but subscriber losses drag on revenue
EchoStar reported 2024 total revenue of $15.8 billion, down from about $17 billion in 2023. The company blamed revenue declines primarily on subscriber losses in each segment, but most significantly in the pay TV unit.
Fewer pay TV subscribers also contributed to a reported 5% yoy decline in total Q4 revenue, which was about $4 billion in the period. Still, pay TV is still the biggest revenue contributor, generating around $2.6 billion in Q4, down from about $2.8 billion a year ago. Pay TV OBIDA was about $800 million in Q4 and $2.98 billion for the full-year 2024.
And while Dish faces a competitive environment, including in the live streaming TV space, executives emphasized a few bright spots, including a full-year 4.2% yoy ARPU bump across pay TV, as well as lower subscriber acquisition costs (SAC) and reductions in churn.
Gary Schanman, EVP and group president of video services, attributed lower marketing subscriber acquisition costs, as well as churn improvements, to the use of proprietary AI and machine learning capabilities that he said help the company better identify, attract and retain higher-quality customers.
For Dish TV specifically, 2024 churn of 1.46% improved 23 basis points over 2023, while costs to acquire subscribers improved 10.5% year over year. The churn improvement was also attributed to data-driven retention efforts, alongside an improved Dish TV Hopper UX, a bundled Netflix offer for Dish TV customers and a lack of programmer blackouts.
Sling TV, meanwhile, also saw churn improve by 141 basis points year-over year, which Schanman said was “our lowest level since the pandemic.”
Integrating video with other assets
The results come after EchoStar (which completed its merger with Dish at the start of 2024) last year failed to get a proposed merger of the Dish pay TV businesses with satellite pay TV provider DirecTV across the finish line. The all-debt deal was terminated after Dish bondholders rejected a debt equity swap that was needed to advance the transaction. Still, EchoStar did secure a series of financing transactions last year and also eliminated certain debt through a debt exchange offer, which improved results including total company net losses for 2024.
Dish is also building out a 5G network and has combined that segment with the Boost Mobile wireless retail business, both of which were part of a deal related to government approval of the T-Mobile-Sprint merger – with the intent of having Dish enter the market as a fourth, facilities-based national wireless competitor.
But with the DirecTV-Dish deal dashed and video still part of its portfolio, going forward it intends to integrate content and video offerings more closely with other services – namely Boost Mobile and its Hughes satellite broadband business.
“Our main focus in 2025 is to better integrate and cross-sell our [video] products with the Boost Mobile and Hughes product portfolios,” Schanman said on Thursday’s earnings.
The first move already made on that front was the recent launch of Sling TV content within the Boost Mobile app, “providing our wireless customers added value with free content.” And the company has already been cross-bundling pay TV services with Hughes consumer connectivity services throughout the year.
To be clear, Hamid Akhavan, CEO and president, EchoStar Corporation told investors, “I don’t want to set any expectation that this is…part of the growth plan we have for the year,” in terms of further integrating video into product offerings.
Still, asked on the call by equity analysts if the approach is similar to what some other cable operators are doing (such as Charter for example, which recently brought video back into the bundle with other services like broadband), while Akhavan acknowledged there are cable operators already doing some degree of selling broadband alongside content or video offerings, he said EchoStar has just started “scratching the surface of what we can bundle.”
The CEO cited “very good results” of bundling pay TV with connectivity and noted some early indications from the Sling TV-Boost app integration that it’s increasing usage and customer adoption.
He categorized EchoStar’s existing efforts on integrating video with other products as “just a couple of small examples” adding, “we expect a lot more to happen this year.”
But here too, the aim isn’t necessarily about reprioritizing video, but instead looking to tie together its satellite connectivity, content services, and cloud-based 5G mobility assets for differentiated products – where Akhavan said 2025 should be a year where some of these “become very tangible in terms of market offerings.”
Schanman also pointing to broader aims from incorporating video into other product offerings.
“We’ll continue to more deeply integrate our content experiences into Boost Mobile to help support wireless growth,” Schanman commented.