EchoStar Does, Indeed, Buy Voom -- Cablevision In-Fighting Could Mean Trouble

from the as-expected... dept

While it's been rumored for about a month, it looks like EchoStar has agreed to buy Cablevision's Voom satellite TV offering that has been a big money pit for the company. There's a bit of irony in this deal, in that the whole reason Voom came about in the first place was EchoStar's desire for a competitor to prove to the FCC that there would be no antitrust violation if they bought DirecTV. Apparently, the decision to sell Voom was a contentious one within the Dolan family who owns Cablevision. Some members of the family made a last ditch effort to buy the division themselves but that didn't work out. Now, the speculation is that the family in-fighting is going to force the family to sell off Cablevision completely. That might be unfortunate. While, like any cable provider, there are plenty of people who are not fans of Cablevision, the company has been more innovative than other cable providers. They were one of the first to offer cable broadband service (and they built their own rather than going through @Home like everyone else), and, more recently they've been fairly innovative in completely giving away VoIP, in order to keep customers signed up for TV and broadband service.

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