Weird Question: Reselling DSS signal? (1 Viewer)

[Vince Maskeeper]

Do dish provides offer their CONTENT to commercial providers to resell?

The reason i ask is this:

I have a friend that lives in a rather large apartment building (there are 2 buildings actually- 9 floors each- pretty decent size for a small town area). They have contracted cable service with some 3rd party company (where Time Warner supplies every private residence locally, they have some outfit called Odyssey supplying cable service).

This cable company is taking DSS feeds (straight from consumer tuners it seems) and reselling it to apartment services. All the "local" commercials for Pay Per View events and whatnot are DirectTV or DishNetwork commercials, complete with the channel number listing for the channel for payperview service.

It's interesting when a channel experience "rain fade" during storms, the program guide banners for consumer DSS tuners pop up on screen when it regains signal. It seems they're taking a feed directly off a DSS tuner box with the channel banners, time and all.

I wondered if anyone else had seen this- and how exactly such a reselling license might work?

-Vince

 

[Chris_Morris]

Dish Network has packages like that, so I'm sure Direct does too. Sounds like they are buying a bulk package, in which they get a bill, then charging each tenant, and keeping the profits. Pretty sound business.

http://commercial.dishnetwork.com/co...al/index.shtml

(MDU=Mulitiple Dwelling Units- anything from apartments to mobile home parks, etc)

The MDU program provides a Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) service to MDU property residents via centrally located, shared dish antennas. This style of installation provides service to the entire property while avoiding individual dish antennas on every roof.

The MDU Bulk program was designed for properties where the entire population is committed to subscribing to Dish Network services. Based on 100% of the property participating, programming packages are delivered at a significant discount. The 100% participation factor is non negotiable and requires that service is operational in all units at all times.


Chris

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

Chris,

Sounds reasonable- but sounded like something an apartment association or ownership would do in conjunction with dish/direct TV directly and be billed by DirectTV for X subscribers to their service--- just found it interesting a 3rd party "cable company" would pop up to resell the service under a cable company name, never mentioning dish brand, nor offering Dish related services. They sell it as if it was Time-Warner cable.

I've even looked around and can find no dish cluster on site- so it seems these people are setup off site and pipe the feeds in. I would have also imagined they would have a more elegant solution to receiving/distributing the signal, rather than the same consumer boxes customers use.

Interesting stuff.