EchoStar Picks Up More Of Voom Leftovers
from the how-the-deals-work dept
EchoStar certainly took the long way around to getting into the HDTV satellite business. EchoStar was the company that convinced Cablevision to create Voom in the first place, to act as competition so they could get approval to buy DirecTV (a deal that eventually fell through). Later on, EchoStar bought Voom’s only satellite, but Voom was left with a service without a satellite — leading to all sorts of infighting within Cablevision over what to do with the service, before finally agreeing to just shut it down a few weeks back. Of course, then DirecTV announced plans to offer HDTV this week, and suddenly EchoStar and Cablevision worked out a new agreement for EchoStar to offer Voom’s HDTV channels on its own Dish Network — letting EchoStar leap past DirecTV’s announcement in one simple move, which probably cost them next to nothing.
