Baby Bell Satellite TV Services Successful

Baby Bells (SBC Communications and BellSouth Corp.) have been very successful in their roll-out of satellite TV offerings. Between the Baby Bell satellite TV offerings, they signed up over 200,000 satellite TV customers in the fourth quarter of 2004.

For the satellite TV companies, the co-marketing efforts with the baby bells has been a real business-booster.

Combined, DirecTV and DISH Network added more than 3.3 million subscribers to their services in 2004.

The two companies ended year 2004 almost neck-and-neck, with DirecTV having about 14 million customers and DISH Network with about 11 million customers.