DirecTV and Dish are merging

DirecTV has reached an agreement to acquire Dish TV, Sling TV, and the rest of Dish parent company EchoStar’s wider TV business, a move that would combine Dish’s roughly 8.1 million subscribers with DirecTV’s 11 million US subscribers, The New York Times reports. The deal is a complicated debt transfer — the transaction price is a single dollar, but DirecTV will assume $9.75 billion of Dish’s debt. The deal serves as a lifeline for EchoStar, which has no means to pay the $2 billion of its overall $20 billion debt due by November 14th.

In a statement, DirecTV chief executive Bill Morrow said a merger between the two companies “will be better able to work with programmers to realize our vision for the future of TV, which is to aggregate, curate, and distribute content tailored to customers’ interests, and to be better positioned to realize operating efficiencies while creating value for customers through additional investment.” This means layoffs.

DirecTV itself is now a standalone company — it was spun out of AT&T in 2021 in a deal that gave private equity firm TPG a 30 percent stake. TPG is now going to buy the remaining 70 percent of DirecTV from AT&T for a reported $7.6 billion, which will result in private equity owning the combined assets of two fading satellite video companies that the press release says have lost “63 percent of their satellite customers since 2016,” which is pretty rough all around. That same press release says that the combined company will “generate cost synergies of at least $1 billion per annum,” which means layoffs.

Dish owner EchoStar will be left to pursue the wonders of Open RAN 5G under its Genesis brand, which was meant to create a fourth major wireless carrier in the US but has mostly just created confusion in various midsize Western cities.

The DirecTV and Dish merger is subject to regulatory approval. DirecTV previously attempted to merge with Dish in 2002, but the deal was blocked by the US Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission over competition concerns. TPG says its transaction with AT&T is expected to close in the second half of 2025, subject to closing conditions, and isn’t conditioned on DirecTV’s merger with Dish going through.