If successful, the merger would create a combined satellite streaming business with around 20 million US subscribers. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
DirecTV has reached an agreement to acquire Dish TV , Sling TV, and the rest of Dish parent company EchoStar’s wider TV business, a move which would combine Dish’s roughly 8.1 million subscribers with DirecTV’s 11 million US subscribers, The New York Times reports. The deal is a complicated debt transfer — the transaction price is a single dollar, but DirecTV will assume $9.75 billion of Dish’s debt. The deal serves as a lifeline for EchoStar, which has no means to pay the $2 billion of its overall $20 billion debt due by November 14th.
In a statement, DirecTV chief executive Bill Morrow said a merger between the two companies “will be better able to work with programmers to realize our vision for the future of TV, which is to aggregate,…