TiVo battle takes chunk of Dish profit
Dish Network said Monday that its second-quarter profit tumbled 81 percent on TiVo litigation costs and rising expenses, but the nation’s second-largest satellite-TV provider managed to add subscribers and maintain revenue.
The Douglas County-based company earned $63.4 million, or 14 cents per share, for the period ended June 30. That’s down from $335.9 million, or 73 cents per share, for the same period last year.
Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters, whose estimates typically exclude one-time items, had forecast profit of 67 cents per share.
Revenue was nearly flat at $2.90 billion, with prior-year revenue coming in at $2.91 billion. Analysts expected revenue would not stray far from year-ago results, predicting $2.91 billion for the current quarter.
Total costs and expenses rose to $2.64 billion, which included a TiVo litigation expense of $196.4 million. In a worst-case scenario, Dish’s court battle with TiVo could force Dish to yank its digital video recorders over patent claims.
Subscriber acquisition costs increased to $388.3 million from $371.4 million, while general and administrative expenses grew to $143.5 million from $122.3 million.
Dish, widely viewed as one of the weaker players in the pay-TV industry, says it added about 26,000 net subscribers — its first quarterly increase in five quarters. The pay-TV industry includes cable, satellite- TV and phone companies that provide TV services.
Dish, which concentrates on being a low-cost provider, said its subscriber growth was helped by the digital transition June 12, the completion of its security-access-device replacement program and new sales and marketing efforts. The Associated Press
E.W. Scripps
The owner of the defunct Rocky Mountain News said Monday it made a profit in the second quarter despite a decline in ad revenue, reversing a year-ago loss that was weighed by impairment charges.
E.W. Scripps earned $2.3 million, or 4 cents per share, up from a loss of $531.2 million, or $9.78 per share, in the same period a year earlier. The 2008 quarter included impairment charges of $583 million from the company’s newspaper businesses and from investments in newspaper partnerships in Colorado.
Revenue fell 23 percent to $193.9 million from $250.9 million.
Earlier this year, Scripps shut down the Rocky Mountain News. Last year, the company split off its cable networks and online-shopping sites into a separate, publicly traded company called Scripps Networks Interactive Inc.
Dynegy
The power provider will sell eight plants plus another under development for about $1 billion in cash and $500 million in stock as the company attempts to bolster its finances and reduce debt.
Houston-based Dynegy reported Monday that its second-quarter loss widened by 27 percent as it wrote down the value of some of the plants it will sell to former development partner LS Power Associates and because of falling energy prices.
Losses for the quarter ended June 30 totaled $345 million, or 41 cents per share, compared with $272 million, or 32 cents per share, in the year-ago quarter.
TW Telecom
The Douglas County-based provider of communications and networking services swung to a second-quarter profit on growth in its data- and Internet- services business.
The company, formerly known as Time Warner Telecom, reported a profit of $5.9 million, or 4 cents a share, compared with a year-earlier loss of $3.2 million, or 2 cents a share. Revenue rose 3.8 percent to $301.1 million.
