DirecTV CEO Says Dish Customers Will Get More Choices

Well, thanks, Caroline. And actually, we're going to offer them something that the new kind of competition cannot. You think about the volume of direct-to-consumer subscription type services. These are the Netflix, Amazon Primes, HBO Maxs that are out there. They have a very narrow scope of the content that they offer, the way in which they can only navigate through their platforms. Consumers are left with having to pick and choose multiple subscription services and manage this on their own. They're having difficulty now navigating across these different platforms. What a new company with DirecTV and DISH will do is number one: it will actually bundle all of those different services together. We'll still have a form of linear or time-of-day type programming where we're going to let the consumer pick and choose two or three or four, if that's what they want, of these other direct-to-consumer programs. We'll wrap a user interface around that that will make navigation easy. It will make search and recommendation easy. But equally as important, Caroline, is that the combined entity with just under 20 million subscribers will give us a very needed influence on the industry to work with the programmers to say the days of the past of 250 channels are gone. Consumers don't want to pay for content that they are never going to watch, and the programmers are still kind of tied to those old carriage agreements. This influence is going to change that. It is in the interest of the consumers. We think it's in the interests of the programmers in the long run and of course to our company as well.

Well, Caroline, we've really studied the market for what are the pain points of the current environment that consumers feel. Again, having to manage multiple subscriptions, not knowing where your content is. Even the biggest search engines can't keep up when you're looking for a particular season or episode of your favorite series or a movie that you want to watch. We know that the consumers need more than what's available today. By combining these two companies and having the influence to change those carriage agreements, we're going to give them thinner linear bundles of genres that they can pick. Let them add in and insert in as VOD or those direct-to-consumer Netflix or Amazon Prime type services. So this, again with a very different kind of experience, will allow us to get back into a growth situation. Now we need the two companies to come together because we are falling fast. You've heard this from a number of different industry experts, so this buys us some time, gives us the influence to shape the industry. That's all about the consumer, and that's going to give something to them that they haven't had.

And that's why we believe with the new kind of carriage agreements that it's going to allow you, the rest of the consumers, the rest of your viewers to pick and choose the genres of their choice and not pay for all the rest of it. So it's not as big of a bundle as what we've seen in the past, and that's what we've been advocating. And that was the deal that we struck with Disney. We fought so hard for it to be able to let the consumers pick what they want to watch and not force them to pay for stuff that they would never tune in to. And that is our future.

Well, we think the current bondholders of the DBS business under EchoStar with cash are going to have a better deal by converting and exchanging into the debt that we're offering. We think it will be better leverage ratios than what we see today. There's better confidence in terms of this business model looking forward into the future without the risks that they might perceive today with our DBS business. We also have advocated and explained that while our initial leverage ratio will be in the 2 to 2 and a half times, that still is better than any other pay-TV provider that is out in the marketplace today. And within a 12 to 24 month window, we're going to be very focused on bringing that leverage ratio down to below two. So that's the reason that we believe they're interested in making this exchange. Lowering that debt, making sure that this M&A deal can happen. And then we, of course, proceed to the FCC and the DOJ for the needed regulatory approvals.