Dish Network

Time Warner’s dramas usually take place on its TV series, rather than its earnings calls. Not today. John Martin, CEO of Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting division, struck back after Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen threatened to permanently drop Turner’s cable networks and said CNN is “not quite the product that they used to be.” “Ordinarily, we wouldn’t be in the practice of commenting publicly as it relates to what’s a private business dispute,” Martin said on Time Warner’s earnings call today. However, Ergen’s comments about the contract dispute during Dish’s earnings call yesterday were “very antagonistic and aggressive,” Martin said.

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 Oct. 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.”

As of 2 a.m. ET on Oct. 21, several Turner Broadcast nets, including CNN, Cartoon Network and TruTV, are no longer available on Dish Network after Turner and the satellite provider could not reach a new deal following lengthy negotiations and extensions to the two companies’ previous contract.

A federal judge indicated a tentative decision that Dish Network isn’t violating copyright law in its offering of a service that allows subscribers to record primetime programs with commercials automatically deleted. U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee’s tentative ruling in favor of Dish Network’s AutoHop features isn’t a surprise. She has sided with the company in previous court rulings as Fox challenged the legality of the service.

Satellite guru Charlie Ergen is rapidly gathering content for his new Internet-based TV offering. Ergen’s Dish Network said Tuesday it secured new digital rights to offer Scripps Networks Interactive programming through its yet-to-launch online video service. The satellite TV provider said the rights are part of an expanded distribution deal to carry Scripps stable of lifestyle channels, including HGTV, Food Network and Travel Channel.

For the first time, satellite broadcasters will be jockeying with other media outlets for a share of political spending that could top $3 billion this year. They’ve historically been shut out of the avalanche of campaign cash because their commercials were directed to a national audience, and didn’t have the local reach of TV and radio stations. But now they’re using digital technology to match voter registration information with subscriber homes, and are now offering political campaigns the ability to send targeted ads to select households.

The owner of the Oregon ABC affiliate, Heartland Media, says it fears the satellite service will drop the station on Thursday since negotiations for a new carriage contract have been unsuccessful.

Dish Network and A+E Networks have agreed to terms for a multi-year contract renewal. This agreement includes OTT multi-stream rights for live and video-on-demand content. It also expands Dish customers’ […]

The rules for who can stream Internet TV are up in the air in light of a new appeals court decision over “Dish Anywhere,” which is remarkably like the Aereo technology that the Supreme Court shut down last month. In a short ruling issued on Monday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused a request by Fox to shut down “Dish Anywhere,” which lets consumers record the broadcasters’ shows on a DVR and then beam them over the Internet to a computer or mobile device.

Dish Network and its chairman, Charles Ergen, have been slapped with a lawsuit over the bankrupt wireless company LightSquared. In the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Colorado, Harbinger Capital Partners accuses Ergen, Dish Network and others of engaging in “an illegal scheme of involving mail and wire fraud, banktruptcy fraud, torious inteference, and abuse of process.”

Bolstered by a victory for broadcasters against Aereo last month, Fox on Monday challenged the legality of a Dish Network feature that allows subscribers to watch station feeds on devices outside the home. In oral arguments before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Fox’s legal team sought to reverse a lower court ruling in which a federal judge refused to grant a preliminary injunction that would put an immediate halt to Dish’s Dish Anywhere service, concluding that it had not proven it would suffer irreparable harm if it continued.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Dish Network Corp.’s Chairman Charlie Ergen seems to be running into a recurring theme: always a groomsman, never the groom. In a regulatory filing by AT&T on Tuesday, DirecTV details the circumstances leading up to their $49 billion deal. The filing revealed that Dish was in the bidding after all. But the process ended the same way as many other recent tie-ups, with Ergen sidelined as a rival took the prize. WSJ subscribers can read the full story here.

The Wall Street Journal Dish Network is in discussions with NBC over Dish’s ad-skipping digital video recorder, the latest sign that a two-year-old standoff between Dish and major broadcasters is easing. While the talks are under way, NBC has put its lawsuit against Dish on hold, the people say. NBC is one of three major networks still in litigation with Dish over several features on its “Hopper” digital video recorder, including one that makes it easier to automatically skip commercials. WSJ subscribers can read the story here.

Verizon Wireless is very interested in buying Dish Network’s spectrum. A top Verizon executive told a group of insiders in the last few weeks that the country’s No. 1 wireless carrier was eyeing the lucrative spectrum owned by Charlie Ergen’s satellite TV company, according to a banker with direct knowledge of the conversation.

Dish Network’s head of product management says the satellite TV company would be interested in bidding on the rights to broadcast the National Football League’s Sunday games if rival DirecTV fails to renew its deal. NFL Sunday Ticket has been offered only on DirecTV since 1994, and the two sides are negotiating exclusively to renew the $4 billion agreement, which expires at the end of this year. The deal is so critical that AT&T in its agreement to acquire DirecTV, retained the right to back out of the deal if the contract with the NFL isn’t renewed

Dish Network will begin letting its subscribers pay their bills with bitcoins later this year, the company said on Thursday. The satellite TV giant will be the first subscription pay-TV provider to make the move and one of the biggest companies to begin accepting the currency to date.

Stock prices of satellite-TV companies came hurtling toward Earth Thursday after Charlie Ergen, chairman of the second-largest player in the sector, Dish Network, said a deal with DirecTV was unlikely. Ergen said he couldn’t afford such a deal as DirecTV’s share price has become a bit too frothy.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Dish says it plans to launch its Internet-delivered TV service by year’s end on mobile devices, game consoles and smart TVs for about $20 to $30 […]

Dish is reported to be looking at debuting its U.S. Internet TV service late this summer. The company, which is said to be negotiating for live-streaming channels over the Internet, is targeting 18 to 34, a smartphone and tablet market.

Hearst Television announced Wednesday that it has reached a retransmission consent agreement with Dish Network covering carriage of Hearst Television stations in the 25 Hearst Television markets. In a statement, the company said:  “We appreciate the support and patience of our viewers, advertisers and local communities served by our stations. We regret the inconvenience they’ve experienced over the past several hours.  We are pleased the interruption was brief and that our stations have been restored on Dish Network systems.”

More than two dozen network-affiliated Hearst Television stations went dark on the satcaster Tuesday night after the sides hit a wall in their retransmission talks. Dish Network’s carriage deal with Hearst TV expired March 1, but the parties had extended the deadline to last night at 10 p.m. ET. The blackout affects more than two dozen Hearst stations including ABC affil WCVB Boston (DMA 7), and outlets in top 25 markets Sacramento, Pittsburgh and Tampa.

Dish Network Corp. Chairman Charlie Ergen recently contacted DirecTV Chief Executive Officer Mike White to discuss a merger of the two satellite television companies, according to several people with knowledge of the matter. Shares of both companies rose.

In the race to deliver TV over the Internet, Charlie Ergen’s Dish Network is pulling ahead. And that may have implications for marketers and other media companies that have grown familiar with Ergen’s penchant for disrupting established businesses. With a groundbreaking agreement this week with Disney, his satellite company is poised to be the first to offer an Internet-based competitor to cable, a new kind of business that other major companies such as Intel and Apple have tried —and so far failed — to deliver.

Four months in, Fusion, the joint venture between ABC News and Univision, is shaking up its programming while adding 14 million more homes. Dish Network will now carry the news and lifestyle channel geared toward millennials, making it available in about 35 million homes, well on the way to its goal of being in 60 million homes in its first 5 years.

Less than 24 hours after Charlie Ergen’s Dish Network signed a groundbreaking deal with Disney that gave the satellite TV service the building blocks of an Internet TV operation, a second company waded into the sector. Verizon is looking to sign deals with content partners to bring a mobile Internet TV service to its FiOS customers, CEO Lowell McAdams said at a conference on Tuesday.

The companies announce a “wide-ranging” deal that paves the way for Dish to offer live local broadcasts from ABC TV stations and programming from ABC Family, Disney Channel, ESPN and ESPN2 over mobile devices, set-top boxes and other means, similar to how Netflix’s video streams are delivered today. The agreement also “will result in dismissal of all pending litigation between the two companies, including disputes over PrimeTime Anytime and AutoHop.”

Weeks after withdrawing a $2.2 billion bid to buy bankrupt LightSquared and its 4G spectrum, Charlie Ergen is about to win a government auction for the so-called H Block of spectrum. The $1.56 billion acquisition, expected to be announced this week, a source close to the situation said, will make Ergen’s Dish Networks the fifth-biggest spectrum owner.

Public interest watchdog groups held a lobbying session at the FCC earlier this month, making a case for barring joint sales and shared services agreements in which the stations share management or in which one of the stations in the combo sells 15% or more of the advertising time of the other.

Dish Network and DirecTV are combining their sales efforts for addressable TV advertising for political campaigns.

Its stations and those of Esteem Broadcasting are back on the satellite provider after being off since Dec. 8.

KECI Missoula, Mont., GM Richard Reingold: “Since late Saturday, Dec. 7, KECI-TV NBC Montana has been missing from Dish Network’s satellite TV service. Dish customers are angry and want to know what happened. I welcome this opportunity to explain.”

Sixteen stations (which include stations it provides services for) from NYC-based Bonten Media went dark for Dish Network subscribers over a retransmission contract impasse over the weekend.

The satellite TV giant details an elaborate “ruse” that includes impersonation, uninvited house calls, phony complaints from neighbors and exploitation of the U.S. military to avoid early cancellation fees.