Bad News For Dish Network

Dish Network made its first public statement regarding issues surrounding the AMC-14 satellite launched on Friday, March 14^th. In a form 8-K filing today with the SEC, the satellite TV provider confirmed what had been speculated on over the last few days. The satellite made it into orbit, but is lower than it should be, and currently unusable.

While that is the bad news, there is still potential for the AMC-14. The filing goes on to detail the main option, correcting the orbit of the satellite. This is currently being evaluated by engineers from the owner, SES Americom and the manufacturer, Lockheed Martin.

No estimate was given on how long it will take to evaluate and/or move the satellite into its proper orbit. Moving the satellite using its onboard fuel will give DISH the potential of some use, but will “substantially” reduce the overall service life of the satellite according to the filing.

As previously posted here, it remains a bad situation from the DISH Network corporate perspective. DISH admits in today’s filing:

“The launch anomaly will result in a delay in our roll out of some high definition channels, including some local network channels.”

Looking at the time frames to launch, activate, and begin broadcasting from a satellite, DISH may be understating things quite a bit in that statement. They can only hope that their business partners can quickly correct the AMC-14 orbit; otherwise there will be little or no addition to the DISH HD lineup this year.

In other satellite TV news, the latest speculation has the DIRECTV 11 launch happening on March 19^th at the earliest.