Charter Communications chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge expects 2022 to be the year when the cable business gets back to normal, or as close to that benchmark as it can, while it takes advantage of what he believes to be the company’s biggest growth driver -- wireless. 

“I see 2022 as a sort of return to normalcy kind of year for us,” Rutledge said at the UBS Global TMT Virtual conference Wednesday, adding that the past two years have been disruptive for Charter and the industry as a whole. “We’re getting back on plan in ‘22 in terms of growing the business, and growing the kinds of product sets we want to deploy. The biggest growth opportunity, the biggest growth driver going forward starting in ‘22 is mobile.”

Rutledge said the mobile opportunity is even bigger since Charter has revamped its billing system. 

“The initial billing system that we launched with didn’t really scale as well as we wanted it to,” Rutledge said. “We actually had to hold back marketing and efforts to grow that business because of the scale issue that we had before we could switch out systems. Those are done and we have the ability to accelerate growth in the mobile platform and do that in a logical way.”

Charter currently has about 3.2 million wireless subscribers. 

Rutledge acknowledged that broadband subscriber growth is slowing, but didn’t give any specifics like his peers earlier in the UBS conference. The Charter chief said that the pandemic changed consumer behavior towards broadband and led to huge spikes in subscriber growth -- Charter added about 2.2 million broadband customers in 2020, nearly double the 1.4 million it added in 2019. While it’s inevitable that that kind of growth will wane as people return to work and school -- he called it the “unwinding” of that earlier behavior -- he still sees a lot of opportunity in the sector. 

Also: Cable Shares Slip After Comcast’s Watson Says Operator Will Add 1.3 Million Broadband Subs in 2021

“I do think that the opportunity to grow the business is pretty much unchanged,” Rutledge said. “If you look at it on a four- or five-year growth rate trend, it’s pretty solid, pretty straightforward and pretty consistent. I think that that future will look more like the trend than it will look like the third or fourth quarter.”

On the video side, Rutledge does see subscriber declines continuing, but added that might slow as well as customers, especially sports fans, see the value of the bundle. 

With 32 million total customers and just under 16 million video subscribers, half of Charter’s customers don’t subscribe to its video product anyway, Rutledge added. Charter’s strategy is to provide as many different video packages as it can, while also helping consumers who have cut the cord better access direct-to-consumer products. 

“I see us becoming more transactional and helping these direct-to-consumer businesses work and to help sell those direct-to-consumer models,” Rutledge said, adding that he still feels a responsibility to provide a robust video product. 

“I think the decline in full package services will abate to some extent, because it’s still the primary way to get sports,” he continued. “But how it ultimately breaks up and gets into sports direct and entertainment direct, that could be a long way away. We’ll continue to play in all of those parts and try to find the opportunities for us in our relationship with our customers that video presents us.” ■ 

Hidden amid the flurry of praise that surrounded AT&T over its relatively strong first quarter performance, mainly for growing its streaming business, was a sentence from one analyst report that kind of brought the whole media transformation narrative home for me in a compact 23 words: “If DirecTV continues to bleed subs at its average pace over the last year, there will be no subs left in 5 years.”

Now, at the risk of showing my age, after reading that sentence, all I could think about was Ziggy Stardust. 

But then again, a lot can happen in five years.

What was almost a throwaway line in Bernstein media analyst Peter Supino’s report on AT&T, a line that would have seemed impossible to utter 10 or 15 years ago when DirecTV was still considered to be the gold standard for pay TV, is now considered to be even a little conservative. Now, even after attracting a new investor in TPG Capital -- which arguably gets an interest in the satellite company at a bargain price -- DirecTV, in many minds, has been relegated to little more than a cash flow play. 

Also Read: AT&T and TPG: There is No Why

And what’s more, no one seems to care. Cable operators gave up on video growth years ago. Consumers just want to stream now and once old folks who cling to their pricey cable TV subscriptions, like me, begin to smarten up or die off, there won’t be anyone left to pay for so-called traditional TV.

Supino, in an email message, clarified his take on DirecTV, which he said was a “uniquely bad story,” adding that Bernstein believes that “the NFL inclusion of the broadcast associated streaming channels in the league’s new TV deals is a harbinger of accelerated change. As such rights move to streaming, soon there will be no reason to receive TV in a scheduled, broadcast format. In this context we think the broadcast networks and general interest cable channels, which commonly benefit from real estate in the legacy TV bundle that helps them monetize marginal programming and sub-scale channels, had better take more risk with the amount of programming they invest in their streaming ventures.”

I’ve written a lot about AT&T’s approach to distribution, so I won’t bore you with those details again. But one interesting note from the Supino report -- of the 2.7 million HBO Max additions in Q1, about 1 million to 1.5 million of them were likely people who are receiving the service via AT&T Mobility and/or Fiber bundles. In other words, they are getting HBO Max for free.    

But it is becoming pretty evident that the industry is moving toward  an app based future that doesn’t include a traditional pay TV relationship. That shouldn’t really come as a surprise, except for the speed at which it is happening.

Earlier this month, at a conference run by Fierce Video, Major League Baseball chief operations and strategy officer Chris Marinak said he  was encouraging teams and regional sports networks to accelerate their plans to go direct-to-consumer. A lot are already doing it. Bally Sports Networks -- formerly Fox Sports RSNs -- have said they plan to offer a DTC option next year. YES Network, home of the New York Yankees and partially owned by Sinclair and Amazon, launched their authenticated app this season, but it could easily accommodate a DTC offering when the team deems to do so. 

Also Read: Sports and OTT: Streaming Could Squeeze the Last Vestige of Appointment TV

The idea is that the RSNs would eventually offer a hybrid -- linear distribution as well as DTC. But in the end, it’s likely that the model will shift entirely to DTC after awhile, and that would be the final nail in Pay TV’s coffin. Sports, especially exclusive sports, has been the glue that held the pay TV bundle together. Without that, and with ESPN Plus and Fox Sports Go and the like already available via app, the reasons to hold on to a traditional pay TV subscription are quickly fading.   

DirecTV lost 620,000 subscribers in Q1, and since Q4 2018 it has shed about 7.1 million. Once the largest pay TV company in the country with 20 million customers, DirecTV now has about 13 million. The pace of those losses has picked up over the past 12 months to about 2.5 million a year, so yes, Supino is right, at that rate there will be no subscribers left by this time in 2026. Dish Network, which has about 8.8 million satellite TV subs, loses about 1.5 million TV customers per year, so using that math it won’t have any subscribers in about the same time frame, five years. 

Now, I’m not so sure that pay TV is going to disappear in five or 10 years, but it definitely won’t look the same. It’s not like all those subscribers will suddenly just stop watching TV, but they will find another way to watch it. DirecTV and Dish aren’t strictly satellite companies either. AT&T has an IP video offering, (AT&T TV), a streaming option (AT&T TV Now, formerly DirecTV Now, but they aren’t taking any new customers). Dish has an OTT service with around  2.5 million customers, Sling TV. 

And the rest of the industry isn’t immune to cord cutting either. Cable operators have seen their video dominance erode greatly over the past decade. And that got me thinking as to how much time cable has left. 

While the narrative in the cable industry has shifted dramatically in the past couple of years toward broadband, the fact is that cable is losing video customers too at a pretty high rate. In the past two years, according to MoffettNathanson, cable companies shed 4 million customers as their collective hold on the industry fell from 51 million in 2018 to 47 million in 2020. At that pace, 2 million lost cable subscribers per year, the industry will have 0 video customers by 2045. 

Also Read: Verizon FiosTV Subs Drop Back to 2011 Levels

But chances are it happens a lot faster than that.

“The old adage in tech is that things change less in five years, and more in ten, than anyone could ever imagine,” Moffett said in an email message.  “I think that’s the rule that will apply here.  Will there still be a linear video business in five years?  Absolutely.  Will there still be one in ten?  I’m not so sure.”

Moffett added that waiting for pay TV subscribers to totally disappear isn’t the way to gauge the industry either. 

“I don’t think extrapolating current trends all the way to zero is the right way to think about it,” Moffett continued.  “That might be the way the demand side works – a gradual decline in the number of older ‘traditionalists’ might translate to a similarly gradual decline in demand for linear video – but it’s not the way the supply side will work.”

Moffett said there already is evidence that both broadcast and cable networks are “strip-mining” their channels for fodder for their streaming services. Just look at the most recent National Football League rights deal for evidence of that. 

“There will be a point of no return when the whole linear ecosystem simply unravels, and it will be supply rather than demand that unravels it,” Moffett said. “That’s more than five years away, but it may be less than ten.”

So distributors won’t kill cable, networks will. That seems right. When it really comes down to it, any video distribution service is only as good as its programming. Satellite used to claim better pictures and superior programming to cable and they were right. Then, when it launched Sunday Ticket out-of-market NFL packages, it one-upped cable sports offerings and customer growth soared.  Now, some pundits are predicting that with DirecTV’s customer base declining rapidly, Sunday Ticket could go to another distributor, perhaps Comcast or its streaming service Peacock. 

With every programmer either with an app or planning one, a future where all programming is obtained via some direct-to-consumer relationship is not so far-fetched. In fact, distributors may prefer it that way. 

Because while juggling separate subscriptions to Netflix and Disney Plus and HBO Max and Amazon Prime and Paramount Plus and Discovery Plus all may be fairly manageable to the average consumer now, once every channel goes the DTC route, it could quickly become a nightmare.

Having cable operators serve as “app aggregators,” bundling different programming apps based on genres or prices or something else, while they are selling broadband, would seem to solve a couple of problems. Content companies could stick to what they know best -- creating programming -- while leaving the nuts and bolts of distribution -- billing and customer service -- to the segment that counts those functions as key components of their respective wheelhouses. 

Cable operators could bundle apps in packages for consumers reminiscent of the way C-band satellite programming used to be sold, moving the charges collected -- minus a little fee off the top -- to the respective programmers. Practically every analyst I’ve spoken to over the past few years thinks this is the direction the industry is heading. When I proposed the same scenario to one long-time cable guy about a year ago he had one caveat: “It won’t be a little off the top.”

It’s just that now it may happen sooner, rather than later.  

The top 14 residential broadband providers added 455,000 customers in the second quarter, more than double the 230,000 added in the same period of 2017, according to Leichtman Research Group

Big gainers included Comcast, which added 260,000 high-speed internet users in Q2 compared to just 175,000 last year. Overall, the top seven cable operators added 585,726 users in the second quarter up from 461,997 in the three-month period ending June 30, 2017.

Related: Pay TV Subscriber Losses Dropped to About 415,000 in Q2 as vMVPDs Continue to Grow

The top seven telco operators nearly halved their losses, with their ranks reducing by 130,453 compared to 233,260 in the comparable year-ago Q2. Frontier Communications, which lost 101,000 HSI users in the second quarter last year, lost only 32,000 in the most recent quarter.

“The broadband industry added nearly twice as many subscribers in 2Q 2018 as in last year’s second quarter,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc. “This quarter marked the first year-to-year quarterly broadband increase since 2Q 2016.”

Overall, it was the first time top ISPs grew subscribers year over since the second quarter of last year.

Collectively, the top 14 ISPs control 95% of the U.S. residential HSI market. And the top seven cable companies now control 64.7% of that market.

The positive subscriber numbers will undoubtedly help the cable industry on Wall Street, with investors having become skittish regarding the prospects of HSI market saturation. 

Citing faulty internal forecasting, Netflix missed its U.S. and international subscriber targets by about 1 million customers in the second quarter, which immediately sent its shares southward.

Netflix added 670,000 streaming customers in the U.S. in the second quarter, about half of the 1.2 million additions the company had projected. Internationally, Netflix said it added about 4.47 million new subscribers, short of its quarterly target of 5 million additions.

Expectations were high that the SVOD pioneer would meet its targets, which at the time were considered fairly conservative.  

The miss sent Netflix stock down 13% ($51.89 per share) to $348.59 each in after-hours trading Monday.

Related: Netflix Adds 7.41 Million Streaming Subs in Q1

“We had a strong, but not stellar Q2,” the company said in a statement. “This Q2, we over-forecasted global net additions which amounted to 5.2 [million] vs. a forecast of 6.2 [million] and flat compared to Q2 a year ago, as acquisition growth was slightly lower than we projected.

Related: This Week in Netflix: Q2 Sub Expectations High

On the financial side, the numbers were strong. Revenue was up 40% in the period to $3.9 billion and the company reported a profit of $384.3 million or 85 cents per share, compared to $65.6 million or 15 cents per share in the prior year.

Disney chief Bob Iger addressed mounting fears that its ESPN sports network was losing customers to skinny bundles head-on Tuesday, telling analysts on the company’s fiscal Q1 earnings call that the sports channel has seen an uptick in subscribers in the past few months, in part because it has reached deals to be included in slimmed-down programming packages from distributors.  

Disney has been hit hard on fears that the absence of ESPN from skinny bundle packages from over-the-top providers like Verizon’s Custom TV package was eroding its subscriber base. A report from measurement giant Nielsen that ESPN had shed about 3 million subscribers in 2015 added fuel to those fears.

However, since August, when Disney first announced that it had seen a slight downturn in ESPN subscribers, Iger said the network’s fortunes have improved. The channel has been included in new “lite” packages from Sling TV which have resonated with millennials and brought former cord-cutters back to the pay TV fold. In addition, Nielsen has since revised its 2015 subscriber estimates, now claiming the losses were in the 1.2 million subscriber range.

Iger added that ESPN is in discussions with other distributors regarding including ESPN in their “lite” programming packages. He added that the uptick had not had an impact on the fiscal first quarter -- which ended Jan. 2 -- because it occured toward the end of that fiscal period and after.

"The subscriber trends that were going in a negative direction have abated somewhat," Iger said on a conference call with analysts to discuss quarterly results. "We believe the predictions that many have made are more dire than they should be."  

The Disney chief said the trends are showing that the expanded basic bundle is indeed healthy and sports programming is still compelling.

"The notion that either the expanded basic bundle is experiencing its demise or that ESPN is cratering in any way from a sub persective is just ridiculous," Iger said. "Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, live sports is among the highest rated programming across television and ESPN has this incredible set of licensing agreements with all the major sports; [it] has the best menu of live sports out there."

In the middle of the #SAGAwards -- think, "Meanwhile, in another #universe," -- wrestling fans dissatisfied over the outcome of a WWE match created a hashtag of their own that was trending worldwide by night's end: #CancelWWENetwork.

The hashtag began showing up after Sunday night's #RoyalRumble (pre-match videos) ended with Roman Reigns victorious. It appears he's old-hat, and both the live and online audiences were unhappy that younger stars in the WWE's stable were overlooked. Combined with some streaming issues, the outcome in the ring had fans urging online subscribers to bail on the SVOD outlet that aggravated at least some pay-per-view providers when it launched last spring.

Monday afternoon, the hashtag was still among the top five trending topics on the social media platform.

By then, WWE had canceled Monday Night RAW because of the blizzard invading the East Coast, but the move took on a wholly larger significance in the Twittersphere. "Monday Night Raw may be canceled due to weather.... Looks like even God decided to #CancelWWENetwork," tweeted @cigarsNscotch, a comical feed. Others posted screenshots of their cancellation notices (see photo), while many tweeted that cancelling a subscription over one event was tantamount to cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

"The #CancelWWENetwork movement is insane. You're gonna take it out on the entire roster because one guy won a match you didn't want him to?" @TheWrestlingMania posted, while @David_Leavitt (writer David Leavitt) tweeted, "I boycott #SouthPark because Kenny always dies. #CancelWWENetwork."

It remains to be seen how seriously fans take the hashtagged mandate, but the debacle garnered the attention of mainstream publications like Time magazine and Rolling Stone, which dubbed the event "the Philadelphia Phuck You."

Despite relentless regulatory threats (see Rules), at least a few bulls believe 2015 will be the year that cable operators — particularly Comcast and Charter Communications — will cross the chasm into positive video growth, capitalizing on satellite’s continued decline and its strong broadband offerings.

In a note to clients previewing his 2015 outlook on the sector, MoffettNathanson principal and senior analyst Craig Moffett said that after several quarters of flirting with positive video growth, both Comcast and Charter should cross into positive territory in 2015, with Comcast adding 70,000 video customers and Charter adding 67,000.

Moffett made a point to separate Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which are expected to complete their $67 billion merger early this year. TWC, which has faced some subscriber challenges over the past several years, will lose about 463,000 video customers in 2014, reducing that to a loss of 186,000 customers in 2015 (which would offset Comcast’s 70,000 gain), Moffett estimated. TWC will add 18,000 video customers in 2016, according to the analyst.

SLUGGISH SATELLITE

That growth won’t necessarily come from new household formation or the realization by millennials that Internet video is just a fad, but mainly from subscriber losses by satellite- TV providers DirecTV and Dish Network. After years of net new subscriber additions in the hundreds of thousands, Moffett predicted, DirecTV will dwindle to 14,000 additions in 2015, culminating in a loss of 151,000 customers by 2018. Dish, which added about 1,000 customers in 2013, is expected to lose about 92,000 customers in 2015 and 134,000 by 2018, according to Moffett’s estimates.

He’s not alone. Other analysts, such as Pivotal Research Group principal and senior media and telecommunications analyst Jeff Wlodarczak, also said satellite’s growth days could be over.

The notion that cable operators could cross the positive subscriber threshold first surfaced in 2013, when Comcast reported its first quarterly video customer-growth in about six years, adding 43,000 video customers in the fourth quarter. That turned out to be just a fleeting glimpse — Comcast ended up losing about 267,000 video customers that year, but it was fewer than in years past and a sign of things to come.

Comcast again reported positive video customers in the first quarter of 2014 (24,000). Although Comcast reported video customer losses in the second quarter (144,000) and the third quarter (81,000), Moffett said he expects a fourth-quarter gain that will reduce full-year subscriber declines to just 9,000.

Charter entered positive video-customer territory in 2012, adding 22,000 customers in the first quarter — which it credited to more-effective packaging and more HD channels — and again in the first quarter of 2014 (18,000 video customers).

Video-subscriber growth has been the cable industry’s Holy Grail for about a decade. The industry last showed a video-customer gain in 2001 when, according to the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, there were 66.9 million U.S. cable customers. As of last March, that number had fallen to 54 million, according to the NCTA.

Video-subscriber growth also comes at a time of high pressure on the video side of the business. Overall cable-video rates are rising between 3% and 5% per year to help partially offset double-digit increases for programming, retransmission consent and sports rights.

Over-the-top video competition also is heating up as Sling TV, Sony, Verizon Communications, HBO and CBS all have plans to offer lower-cost online video packages before the year is out.

OTT THREAT OVERBLOWN?

Moffett believes that Sling TV, Dish Network’s OTT offering, will have some initial interest, but it costs too much for the non-sports enthusiast and lacks the programming true sports nuts crave — regional sports networks and broadcast TV stations. Though the Sony offering is a little hard to forecast, Moffett wrote that maybe investors and industry pundits that fear OTT services that merely aggregate existing cable programming are looking in the wrong place.

“Disruption isn’t likely to come from within the existing ecosystem, in our view,” Moffett wrote. “It is likely to come from outside. Millennials aren’t waiting for a lower-priced package of the same content; they are abandoning the ecosystem altogether in favor of content produced on and for social media at a fraction of the production cost of traditional pay TV.”

That said, Moffett estimated DirecTV and Dish Network would lose a collective 285,000 subscribers by 2018, more than enough to fuel cable increases.

Wlodarczak said he believes that cable has finally caught up with the satellite business after years of fierce competition, adding that even AT&T’s proposed $48.5 billion acquisition of DirecTV won’t be enough to stop the bleeding.

“The presence of AT&T at DirecTV (which we believe will end up driving slower growth in and of itself) is likely to offset improvements in the economy and [satellite] is unlikely to show annual video-subscriber growth ever again,” Wlodarczak wrote in a recent note to clients.

IT’S THE ECONOMY

Wlodarczak said he believes that although there has been a lot of noise on the OTT front, the data shows that the economy has been the biggest factor in pay TV losses, forcing more and more consumers to revert to free, over-the-air broadcast programming. According to Nielsen, broadcastonly households have increased by 1.2 million over that past four years, while new pay TV customers increased by 475,000 homes. With about a 2.65 million additional occupied households in the same period, Wlodarczak wrote that implies that about 1 million households elected to go without TV or to a digital alternative in the past four years.

“As for the argument that millennials are less interested in pay TV, pay TV penetration among 18-24 [year-olds] is actually higher today (90.5%) than it was 4 years ago (88.2%) [although pay TV viewership hours declined over the same period] according to Nielsen,” Wlodarczak wrote. “In our view, if household incomes continue to rise, household formation accelerates off historically low levels, and millennials keep moving out of the basement of their parents’ homes, pay TV results could improve materially.”

Tim Carry says Dish’s disconnect from Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network has been a costly one for the No. 2 DBS provider.

Carry, executive vice president of distribution for FNC and FBN, estimated that Dish has lost some 90,000 subscribers since the channels were removed from the provider's 14 million subscribers late on Dec. 20.

He based the total on the number of viewers that have reached out to the www.keepfoxnews.com website and 888-numbers, and others that have contacted Dish directly.

Carry said that a combined 350,000 have called about or visited the section of the Fox website providing a list of alternative providers in the viewers’ area. He said the numbers began picking up on Dec. 26, after the Christmas holiday.

Given “dwell times” reaching four to five minutes, Carry said the programmer has extrapolated that at least 45,000 of these respondents have dropped Dish.

He said those are not the only means for network viewers to express their disconnect displeasure and intention to move one, and projects that a like number have contacted Dish directly to drop the provider.

“We think they’ve lost about 90,000 subscribers over the past two weeks tied to Fox News,” he said.

A Dish spokesman said, "As is our policy, we don't comment on rumor and speculation."

Fox officials say Dish dropped the signals for the two networks at 11:50 p.m. on Dec. 20, 10 minutes ahead of the expiration of their contract. Dish maintains that Fox that pulled the plug and introduced a third unrelated service into the discussions.

Carry said the parties have yet to connect since:  “They have not spoken to us at all.  There has not been any outreach on any level. Their positioning that they are actively negotiating rings hollow.”

Dish CEO Charlie Ergen in a Christmas Eve video on Dishstandsforyou.com said the parties were nearing a deal, even though Fox News was looking for an increase doubling its rate – a hike he said was somewhat justified given its leadership status in the space. He said the talks, broke down when Fox introduced a third network into the conversation, for which it was eyeing a “surcharge” that would have trebled the cost for a service that was not scheduled to expire “for some time.” Ergen didn’t identify the service.

Many believe that network in question was either Fox Sports 1 or FXX, which were converted from Speed and Fox Soccer Channel on Aug. 17, 2013 and Sept. 2, 2013, respectively. Many distributors launched the services at that forbears’ monthly license fee: some 23 cents for Speed and 18 cents for Fox Soccer.  

Carry maintains his position that the blackout is tied to the networks in question.

“These are big companies with many assets and properties,” he said. “Other things were discussed, but the negotiations broke down over core issues to Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network.”

As to ratings slippage the cable news leader has sustained over the past couple of weeks following the blackout, Fox News officials attribute the downturn to the loss of Dish's overall subscriber base, those who may switched providers and are not yet being measured by Nielsen, as well as a disruption in viewing patterns during the year-end holiday period. The Nielsen numbers should come into sharper view as the nation returns to more typical professional and personal schedules this week.

Despite the emergence of over-the-top video and the effect of technology on the overall media landscape, good old M&A seems to have set the tone for the coming year in the distribution sector. Here are what a few top media analysts believe is in store:

Mergers and Acquisitions: The Comcast- Time Warner Cabe and AT&T-DirecTV pairups will win approval early in the year — with conditions — and industry consolidation will continue. Most analysts expect Charter to lead the consolidation wave after it closes on deals with Comcast-TWC to double its footprint. MoffettNathanson principal and senior analyst Craig Moffett would not be surprised if smaller operators band together with the hope of later being acquired by Charter.

Title II Resolution: The Federal Communications Commission will move to recommend Title II reclassification of cable, which will lead to partisan battles in Congress, lawsuits and, inevitably, a flavor of Title II heavily sprinkled with forbearance. Most analysts believe, like BTIG media analyst Richard Greenfield said in a recent blog post, that forbearance will remove the regulation’s less pleasant attributes, like price regulation.

Ads Rebound: National ad sales, on the skids in 2014, will bounce back. Many analysts see the recent downturn as cyclical instead of proof of structural impairment. When the uptick will occur is “hard to say,” according to Pivotal Research Group media analyst Brian Weiser.

U.S. Pay TV Rise: Expect to see subscriber gains, despite the threat from subscription video-on-demand services, as household growth begins to return, according to Pivotal Research principal and senior media & communications analyst Jeff Wlodarczak.

Dish Network Inaction: Dish will do nothing with its wireless spectrum, which rises in value as broadband needs explode. Wlodarczak believes Dish chairman Charlie Ergen will monetize the spectrum via a lease agreement three years.