Strong Quarter Propels Dish

Total revenue fell just over 5% year over year to $3.5 billion as the company continues to replace higher-revenue satellite customers with lower-revenue Sling ones. Dish remains disciplined about not chasing lower-profit customers with promotional pricing, helping to lower subscriber acquisition cost for the quarter to $763 per subscriber from $806 a year ago. Dish TV churn fell to 1.46% from 1.83% from the same quarter a year ago due in part to the higher quality subscriber base. We note that the firm’s new Dish TV specific churn rate continues to show strong quarterly improvement as the second quarter rate was the lowest of the past six quarters. Adjusted operating income margin expanded to 16.5%, up 150 basis points year over year as the lower costs from a smaller subscriber base more than offset increased content costs.

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