The ironic part of all of this, I would have pay linear TV services if it was cheaper - 50 bucks a month for the whole house, and I suspect they could have 30%+ more customers.

It doesn't solve the problem that "the line must constantly go up". A steady revenue and constant returns isn't good enough, apparently and in the case of dish, it will be declining revenue over time no matter what they do.

Dish profit doesn't scale that way. They have to pay the channels for broadcast rights. More TVs per household means in theory more royalties paid to the networks.

I swear these satellite services could eliminate live tv and go on-demand only using a hard drive DVR style, with maybe 10-20 live channels. Everything else would be a stream that would download and notify you when it was ready. The bandwidth of those dishes has got to be multiple gigabytes per second. They could broadcast everything and the viewers would just opt in to the specific shows or movies they want. Completely switch the business model.

What would be the point though? To offer a slower imitation of streaming to people in remote areas? Most people are happy with regular internet streaming.

Dish did do something sort of similar years ago though, don’t know if they still do, but they did some thing where your DVR would automatically record all primetime shows, so in that way, as long as you were ok waiting for the next day, in a sense, “everything was on demand.” https://www.reddit.com/r/dishnetwork/s/e0wspFb7zq

Re: failing business

To be fair, satellite TV has always been one of these even when it was a healthy business. High cost of acquisition, high commission for sales, high barrier to cancel.