If you're like a lot of Americans, you're probably looking around for the best deal you can find on the products and services that you need. There's no doubt that this also extends to the television service that you use. The complicating factor about TV is that if you're a savvy consumer, you probably realize that you get what you pay for when it comes to a lot of services including TV. Therefore, you might be rationalizing the fact that you're paying a lot more for cable TV than you would for satellite TV by telling yourself that cable TV must be a better deal overall.
The thing about cable TV as compared to a satellite TV company like Dish Network is that you do get what you pay for. The problem with that is that with cable TV you're paying for your cable company to maintain the overly expensive and woefully inadequate infrastructure that it uses to deliver the TV programming. You're paying relatively little for the TV programming itself. To put it more simply, the fact that cable TV uses cables to deliver its TV programming means that it's stuck with a lot more equipment to maintain and upgrade than Dish Network has to worry about. For example, every time there's a flood and the cables are washed out they have to be replaced. That's simply not a concern for Dish Network. Also, if the cable company wants to add more channel, they have to go through the costly and labor intensive process of tearing up the old cables and burying newer higher capacity ones. By contrast, if Dish Network wants to expand its program offerings, all it has to do is add the new channels to its program line up and take advantage of its already ample bandwidth.
You've probably caught on by now to the fact that Dish Network has a very different system of delivering its TV programming. All of Dish Network's programming is transmitted up to satellites in orbit thousands of miles above the Earth. These satellites then beam the programming back down to the surface where it's picked up by home satellite dishes. This really decreases the amount of equipment that it's necessary for Dish Network to maintain. Dish Network has transmitting equipment, the satellites, and the receiving equipment to worry about; while cable TV companies have their transmission equipment and receiver equipment to maintain along with hundreds or thousands of miles of cable in between. Now, you may think that satellites are more expensive than cables, and that's true, but with satellite TV you get an economy of scale. In other words, the costs of maintaining those cables are typically spread out among hundreds or at best a few thousand people, whereas Dish Network has over eleven million subscribers to share the cost of the satellites. In fact all of those subscribers share the cost of the operation of Dish Network in general. That gives Dish Network an incredible financial resource to maintain and upgrade its system, offer hundreds of channels of first rate programming, and give its subscribers rates that easily beat out the cheapest cable TV providers. That means that with Dish Network, you're paying for the programming that you watch rather than paying a cable TV company to blunder around with antiquated technology.
