Yesterday HBO went dark on Dish and the Dish owned streaming service Sling TV. Over the last 24 hours, the fireworks between AT&T’s WarnerMedia and Dish have been heating up. AT&T accuses Dish of walking away from talks but Dish counters that AT&T was demanding “DISH pay for a guaranteed number of subscribers, regardless of how many consumers actually want to subscribe to HBO.”
Now AT&T is firing a new shot at Dish saying they are collaborating with the Department of Justice (DOJ) in an effort to overturn the AT&T and Time Warner merger. “The Department of Justice collaborated closely with Dish in its unsuccessful lawsuit to block our merger,” a WarnerMedia spokesman said in a statement. “That collaboration continues to this day with Dish’s tactical decision to drop HBO – not the other way around. DOJ failed to prove its claims about HBO at trial and then abandoned them on appeal.
Dish is not holding back in their fire as they also fired back saying “AT&T is stacking the deck with free-for-life offerings to wireless customers and slashed prices on streaming services, effectively trying to force DISH to subsidize HBO on AT&T’s platforms,” said LeCuyer. “This is the exact anticompetitive behavior that critics of the AT&T-Time Warner merger warned us about. Every pay-TV company should be concerned.”
Dish did testify against the AT&T Time Warner merger in support of the DOJ’s lawsuit to block the merger. During that testimony, Warren Schlichting the President of Sling TV said “We would lose a lot of subs,” Schlichting said. “There would be severe bleeding. It would be a lose/lose for us, and a win/win for them.”
What do you think of this fight? Leave us a comment and let us know how this all looks to you.
Source: Reuters
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