Dish to Launch 4K When ‘Consumer Demand Is There,’ Clayton Says
Dish Network stands ready to jump into Ultra HD 4K when the time is right, and not as a result of competitive pressures from DirecTV, which has said it will be active in 4K, Dish CEO Joe Clayton said in a recent briefing. “I'm going to do what the consumer tells me to do, not what DirecTV does,” Clayton said.
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Pondering when to jump into new technologies like Ultra HD is “like good bourbon,” Clayton said. “If you drink it too early, it’s not going to taste very good.” Of 4K, “we will wait until it ages properly and make sure the consumer demand is there and we can technically and economically deliver it to the consumer,” Clayton said.
Many in the industry forget that Dish has a legacy of launching new technologies first, Clayton said. “Just remember, we were first with HDTV, we were first with DVRs,” and it was first to do retransmission of local broadcast channels, he said. As an “outside observer” for years before he joined as CEO, Clayton viewed Dish as a company that “has always been first from a technical standpoint,” but “terrible at communicating,” and “not a great marketeer,” he said. “Those days are over. I think we've done a much better job communicating and differentiating what we are as a company and as a service provider."
Clayton admits he was “skeptical” of Ultra HD’s viability when he saw it for the first time about a year and a half ago. But there since have been “a lot of improvements,” he said. “Hopefully, we won’t overpromise and underdeliver like we did with 3D. I never did 3D even in the RCA days, and that goes back 20 years, much less at Dish. We didn’t see it as a mainstream consumer option. Ultra HD, if the content providers and the TV manufacturers come together, that has a real chance of elevating the industry just like HDTV did."
At the same time, a big Ultra HD challenge is that it’s “a bandwidth hog,” Clayton said. “It’s going to require more bandwidth than current HD does today. That is something we'll have to deal with.” But Dish has no plans to cut its offerings “from 200 channels down to 10” just to accommodate Ultra HD, he said. Still, “I believe there’s an opportunity here, especially if the consumer sees there’s a visible difference” from full HD, he said. “It’s still early, but I like what I've seen so far.”