The NFL’s Over the Top (OTT) Sunday Ticket news grabbed the satellite headlines the other day. To counter, DirectTV’s main competitor, Dish Network, broadened its reach at the local level.
Dish Network Adds 2 More HD Markets – 2009-08-19 16:51:04 EDT | Multichannel News: “With the moves, the No. 2 satellite-TV provider now offers local TV-station signals in 182 of Nielsen Media Research’s 210 TV markets, or 97% of them”
If you believe the internet, Dish has the most HD channels at 140. While that may all be well and good, when you are looking up in the subscriber leader board, you have to think outside the box, beyond channel lineup, and Dish is doing just that.
More options may be nice on paper, but people don’t watch HD on paper. By integrating Sling Media’s technology into their HD set top box (STB), Dish subscribers can now watch on their HDTV or Sling connected PC, mobile phone, etc.
This OTT won’t bring you as many NFL games as the Ticket, and that may be exactly how Dish is playing it. An often used scheduling tactic is to go after the share of the market not watching football with programming targeted specifically for them. The problem is properly assessing the viewing habits of that market and the convergence numbers justifying the programming’s expense.
The Sling loaded STB is very cost competitive to Sunday Ticket and functions year round. It will work with any programming broadcasted by Dish, and as stated above, that includes OTA NFL games. Announce back at CES, it had an availability date of Spring 2009. Iit is not listed on the Dish site, but once it is and you are slingloaded: happy viewing.
Tags: DirecTV, Dish, HDTV, nfl, Satellite, sling media, Technology
After the Transition 
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