• January 21, 2005

After bowing to financial pressures, Cablevision has decided to sell its satellite service Voom to EchoStar for $200 million in cash, the cable operator said last week.

The satellite service, which was started in 2003, attracted just over 25,000 subscribers and lost millions of dollars, analysts said. Cablevision has 3 million subscribers overall.

EchoStar, which operates the Dish Network and has more than 10 million subscribers nationwide, is also buying the Rainbow 1 broadcast satellite from Cablevision's Rainbow DBS Co. The sale will give EchoStar rights to 11 frequencies, allowing it to offer more programming and services to more subscribers, including video on demand and high-definition programming.

"We don't know what we'll do with them yet; it gives us flexibility and additional capacity," EchoStar Spokesman Steve Caulk said. "We have a lot of services that we would like to offer our customers and services that we offer that we would like to enhance, so we have a lot to look at." -David Kaplan