A friend told me that "27%" of Dish cancellations
 

recently (or last month or quarter) were because of people going to directv for the mtn. He said it has hurt Dish's bottom line as a result, producing a bad quarter.

Any part of this close to the truth?

I haven't heard that. If that's the case, then Dish ought to finally do what it needs to do in order to add the mtn. to it's programming.

and if they do that I may go back in 2 years.

I doubt it. 27% of their cancels might be over programming, but I doubt it is based on the mtn alone. I'll make a few calls and see if I can get any of the Dish disposition data. My guess is that Dish lost a lot of their customers based on better HD.

I read a recent article stating that Dish was in trouble financially and expected 37,000 subscribers to drop them in the fall. I'm not sure how much of that is mtn related, but it doesn't seem far fetched that a lot of them probably were. That's really not a very high number, but it's high enough to give Dish some heartburn.

Thought I'd read somewhere that DirecTV was looking to buy Dish.

The gov't already nixed one proposed merger due to anti-trust concerns.

That's darn near 2 mil a month straight off the company's revenue, depending on what packages those customers had purchased.

That'll certainly twist the shareholder's panties into a knot...and I'm sure there's more than 30,000 BYU fans around the country who have (had!) Dish & want to see the games...

I don't know that seems awful high to me

Really? That's less than half the people who attend games on Saturdays.

Of all the BYU fans I know, well over half of them live outside the MWC footprint, and based on personality a fair percentage of them would switch in a heartbeat. A significant percentage of those I know who live within an hour of the stadium have switched.

BYU has over 10,000 admission requests filled out every year.

BYU admits about 7,000 students every year.



Granted, a small fraction of those people would actually make the switch, but I think 30,000 is a rather reasonable estimate...