Recently, Dish Network launched Dish Music, a mobile app which allows customers to sync music throughout their home via a central control. This app uses DTS Play-Fi technology to allow customers to stream music from various services such as Spotify, Pandora and Tidal via their Dish devices, at no additional cost. Through this initiative, the company is looking to provide multi-room streaming set ups to its customers, without additional hardware cost. As Dish Network continues to lose subscribers to the cord cutting trend, the company is looking at various ways to retain users. A music app that allows subscribers to stream audio in multiple rooms without additional equipment could work as a subscription perk, and may help retain users in the long term.
Perks For Subscribers Can Help With Retention
Dish Network has been continuously losing subscribers, and the company reported a loss of 143,000 subscribers in Q1 2017. This is despite the fact that the company clubs its streaming service Sling TV’s subscribers with its Pay-TV subscriber base, meaning that the company is losing subscribers overall even after accounting for the growing Sling TV base. We expect these subscriber losses to continue over our forecast period, and forecast Dish Network’s market share to decline from 13.9% in 2017 to 12.9% by the end of our forecast period.
The company is looking at several ways to reduce these losses, and while cord cutting is here to stay, additional perks such as using Dish devices as multi-room audio hardware can help in retaining some subscribers. Dish Network is capitalizing on the fact that it can be expensive and difficult to sync high-quality home audio. By offering this service at no additional cost, the company is looking to appeal further to subscribers.
According to our estimates, Dish Network’s spectrum holdings account for more value than its Pay-TV business. However, its Pay-TV business is significant, and innovative measures to allow customers to see the “value” in their subscription will be key for the company’s long term growth.
[“Source-forbes”]