Well it seems that cord cutting is picking up speed as Dish Network lost twice as many subscribers as expected in the 1st quarter 2017.

Dish Network on Monday reported that it lost 143,000 paying TV customers in the first three months this year. But declining TV subscribers no longer keeps CEO Charlie Ergen up at night.

“The reason I sleep at night pretty well is that what all those (companies) have in common is they need connectivity for those customers to receive video,” Ergen said during the company’s financial conference call Monday. “And Roger (Lynch, Sling TV’s CEO) knows that the majority (of Sling customers) are not on TV screens but on mobile devices. That’s why you need wireless.”

It seems Dish Network sees the future as wireless and has been pivoting away from traditional satellite TV service in recent years. For more than a decade, it has bought government-auctioned wireless spectrum. In April Dish spent $6.2 billion to buy spectrum for a national coverage. Dish said they will use this to build a communications network for “internet of things” devices, from drones to autonomous vehicles, heart monitors to home security systems and any device that connects to the internet.

“We were not only able to get our nationwide spectrum but also stay in the bigger cities where we felt particularly that IoT would be beneficial,” said Ergen, also Dish’s co-founder.

Dish has not commented on the number of Sling TV subscribers they currently have. Yet it is expected that without Sling TV the Dish numbers would be considerably worse.

For all the bad news Dish remained profitable, with net income of $376 million on lower revenue of $3.68 billion, compared to the same period a year ago when net income came in at $400 million on $3.83 billion in revenue.

Source: Variety

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