♪ betty: he is the billionaire media mogul who calls himself the country boy from tennessee. dish network founder charlie ergen speaks out. charlie: i think we have a lot to talk about now. betty: for the first time on bloomberg television, ergen weighs in on the seismic shift taking place in television, his plans to become the next big wireless company, and why he might be looking to merge with that guy, the pink t-shirt wearing t-mobile ceo john ledger. charlie: they certainly have done a fantastic job in kind of being an upstart company, the uncarrier, so to speak. betty: but the famously tough boss faces questions about his management style. charlie: we have high expectations, and if you are not somebody who is used to high expectations, you're just not as comfortable here. betty: join me as charlie ergen dishes it all out on this

edition of "titans at the table." hello, i am betty liu. welcome to "titans at the table." dish network founder charlie ergen has always been something of a fearless renegade. from being thrown out of casinos for counting cards to selling satellites out of his car trunk around colorado. ergen led a group that created echostar in the 1980's and then started dish in the next decade, upending the traditional cable tv world. in the process, he has become one of the richest men in america, worth nearly $20 billion. ergen stepped out of the spotlight in 2011, handing the ceo rein to joe clayton. but just four years later, the founder is back in the hot seat as television undergoes another revolution. video, moving on to your second screen. like the satellite tv business in its early days, ergen wants to be at the forefront of this change by creating a new, over the top product called sling tv

and buying up billions of dollars worth of wireless assets. assets that he says can be used to build a legitimate competitor to at&t and verizon. when we first sat down for our interview at his inglewood, colorado headquarters, i asked ergen to describe this new frontier. charlie: now we are in another transformation, and the transformation is really going about in two places. one is tv itself is transforming. people are looking for more for what they want to watch and not paying for things they don't watch. they want to watch their tv everywhere. and part of that is the technology of ott, over the top, allows customers to do that. and the second transformation is wireless, the wireless industry, where the world is going to be connected all the time. and there is only two ways to do it -- one is through the wire and the other way is to do it wirelessly. and we started on a mission about five years to say we think we want to be part of that connectivity revolution. and we think that the best place

for us to be in the marketplace if we can is in the wireless side. because we really are a wireless company already. betty: and thus you have accumulated something like, what, $50 billion, $60 billion in wireless assets? charlie: we have accumulated about 80 megahertz of spectrum. they vary in prices and valuations of what people think that's worth, but certainly, it certainly is worth a fair amount of money. but it is only really worth money when you put it to use and when you ultimately build a business around it and ultimately get discounted cash flows in the future. and of course that is what we are looking forward to doing. betty: charlie, does this remind you at all -- what you just said -- the transformation of television and this -- you know, the onboarding of so many millions of people wirelessly. does this remind you of the early days of satellite television? charlie: it does. because in the early days of satellite television, everybody -- the incumbents said well, why would anybody pay for a satellite dish? all right? and the answer was pretty simple -- it was better picture quality. it was all digital. it was interactive guide.

it was less expensive. you get to pay a little bit more for -- the bundles were smaller so you had more choices as a consumer. the signal quality was more reliable. it was a better picture. hd tv was more prevelent with satellite. and so now people are asking the question, why would you pay for ott? and there are similarities. ott eliminates some of the pain points. we have 10 to 15 million broadband homes in the united states who don't pay for tv. right? as we know it. they pay for netflix or hulu but they do not pay for tv as we know it. so we take away some of those pain points with sling tv. so you don't have a contract, you don't have equipment to buy and all of that. you can go on vacation and take your service off for a month. you can go on and off the service on the internet. and it is immediate. betty: you can sign up right away. charlie: so you could sign up for sling tv and you are watching the nba finals tonight and you don't have to wait for an installer and somebody to come out. betty: you don't have to take a day off of work and wait for the cable guy. charlie: and it is less expensive.

our basic package is about $20. and then we have seven or eight different mini packs that you can add onto if you want to, including one premium channel in hbo -- service in hbo. so it attracts a lot of people, particularly younger people who are not paying for tv today. or maybe at one time paid for tv, said it was just too expensive, and dropped off the pay tv universe. we certainly are encouraged by the start of sling tv, but we have a long way to go. we are not perfect yet. we knew it would be difficult, but it is technically difficult because we are on lots of different devices, and live tv is really hard, because we are doing things -- we are inventing things like dynamic ad insertion and things like that that haven't been done before for live tv. so it reminds me a lot of when we started satellite -- when we started dish satellite television, we had all kinds of technical problems. and night by night, we had to knock them down one by one by one. it took us about six months. and we occasionally have a technical problem today. betty: but you pretty much resolved it. obviously, you resolved it then, and you believe you will resolve it now in the same timeframe. charlie: there is no question we will resolve the technical

issues, and we have resolved most of them, but we had a choice to make which was do we get out there and kind of find out what we don't know, or do we wait and try to be perfect. and we got out there probably a little ahead of our skis, but i think it will pay off for us now. and for the people watching who didn't have a good experience, try it again because you will have a better experience today. betty: you have all of your cards close to your chest right now. you have got your wireless assets, you have, you know, sling tv, you are looking at various options, so when are you going to -- when are you going to make your play? charlie: well, i mean, i think, that a, we have told people what we are going to do. we have been saying virtually the same thing for five years. so i don't think it is anything really new, in the sense that -- betty: five years, right. charlie: our dream would be to use our spectrum to really enhance the way people connect and provide competition in the wireless business. and not just the wireless business, but the broadband business as well. because i do think that if properly deployed, that a truly -- that we can go to a lot of homes with totally wireless connections and they wouldn't

have a need for cable at all. for any of their needs. so that provides real meaningful competition where there is not that much competition in broadband today. so i think we can do those things. how we do those things i think is the way -- it is not that we haven't played our cards. we don't know. so it is we do not know exactly the best way to play that. because you have to find companies that have a like-minded strategy. you like to have companies that want to move the same direction that you want to do it. and you want them to make sure that it is economic to your shareholders to move in that direction. and we are not that big a company so we don't -- you know, it is not like we can pick the phone up and make things happen. i think there are much, much bigger companies. betty: really? i think anybody would take a call from charlie ergen. charlie: oh, i think people will take our call, but i think that certainly the wireless industry is controlled by two companies today. and they are very -- they are 20 times, you know, bigger than we are. so, they are going to make their moves and do their things and people are probably going to react to that. and so sometimes, you just have to be ready to move when you see other things that happen in the

industry. but we know that -- the one thing we know for sure is the spectrum we have is valuable, the spectrum is going to get put to use, and it is going to create value for our shareholders. but we want to make sure it gets put to use in the most economical way and providing the best competition and the best product. betty: could charlie ergen's next play be a merger with t-mobile? i will ask him if all of those reports make sense when "titans at the table" returns. ♪

betty: welcome back to "titans at the table" and my conversation with media titan charlie ergen. for years, ergen has been buying

up gold. the wireless kind. + i think dish is a culture for those who want to do something and there is some uncertainty as we are talking about what you can do with wireless. it takes a little bit of bravery as a shareholder. employees would like to know what is going to happen tomorrow , so it is a special kind of -- it takes trust in your management, takes an adventurous spirit to work here because you

don't always know exactly where you're going to go. you have to be a bit of a self-starter. for those people who like that, you can start -- we have people who have started in the warehouse that are executives. people who are achieving their own internal potential and they are having a lot of fun. if you are to write a management book, what would it be? that companies -- the culture of the company is important. i think that companies don't have a good track record are surviving on a fountain. it is not saying a culture would involve -- evolve and change. you you establish a culture have got to hire and train into that culture. we have made some mistakes where

we didn'tplacent and do a good job upfront. i think with people generally say they like about the culture is they make a difference. a lot of companies are a lot of data and a lot of meetings. here we are moving quick. we have high expectations. if you are not somebody who is used to high expectations, you're just not as comfortable. i member my kids will be at the relay and track eight at the person whofor the came in first and came in last got medals for participating. but we don't do it that way. companies can be demanding a keeping their employees happy. clear that for the ceo, winning is what counts.

-- will theyrket be a shakeout? who will succeed? >> like any new technology, there will be some carcasses that don't make it. we just hope we are not one of them. we don't mind other people being successful. we try to do it ourselves and we will be successful with a good product and a good choice. >> is it primarily going to be fought on price? be the userlso interface and have the ease of use. just pick it up and use it without instruction manual. certainly, apple has pioneered that kind of thing. but we have done a good job of that ourselves. we have got lots of room for improvement on sling tv. over 200 international channels. we have to make improvements there but it will be fought on a

number of issues, distribution, real estate, devices, and is your app on the devices. so a lot of issues but price will be one of the issues. betty: so given that, i mean, is apple tv -- i mean, the fact they have not revamped this in several years, are they a little too late to the game here? charlie: no, i think we are still in the first inning. so i don't think they are late to the game at all. i don't think the second inning is until next year. so i think that there's -- there is room for multiple entrants and we will probably see multiple entrants, including the cable industry, at some point in time. betty: where do you see video in five years, charlie? charlie: i mean, in general, i see almost any video that you or i would want to watch is probably in the cloud. and we are probably connected to the cloud, and we have access to that video. and the next generation probably doesn't know -- necessarily know video by channel -- by channels, they probably don't know it by comedy central, they know it by this particular show. betty: by the program. charlie: by the program. there is a loss of identity, i think probably, that goes on

between the networks, and -- and it just becomes shows. i mean, netflix is proving that, right? you do not know -- you are getting programming from viacom and discovery, but you don't know it's their programming. and i am a little bit -- i was always a little bit baffled why the programmers did that. but that cow is out of the barn. so you are just going to go -- you are going to just talk to your phone or to your device and say, "this is what i want to watch," and it is just going to pull it up and you are going to start watching it. and you're not going to have to worry about pushing a button to record something. you're not going to have to worry about doing anything. it is just that you are going to have access really on demand to every video. betty: instantly. charlie: whether it is a 1930's movie or it'll be the latest sporting event. betty: so you distribute content, but would you ever go into creating content? charlie: i doubt it. we barely have expertise to do what we are doing today as a company. and we are trying to get better, but we have no expertise on content creation. the only thing we ever -- the only thing we ever created in content was a "charlie chat" show --

betty: that's right. charlie: where i would sit here and talk to our customers like i'm talking to you -- betty: when you were ceo. charlie: when i was ceo, and it was a pretty bad show. and you know, we just haven't -- that is the best we have ever done. betty: have you reinstituted that? charlie: i haven't yet. there is not, like -- the phone is not ringing off the hook to bring back the "charlie chat." [laughter] betty: that wraps up this special "titans at the table" conversation with dish tv founder and ceo charlie ergen. you can find more episodes of our show on bloomberg.com, along with in-depth coverage of today's news and conversations with the world's business leaders. i am betty liu. thanks for watching "titans at the table." ♪

>> coming up, the business stories that shaped 2015. from the long road to lift off, we will take a look back at the year's top headlines. >> i think the fed is basically living in an old age. fromanie: we also hear some of 2015's biggest news anchors. >> the forces of the capitalism will drive that disparity unless government does things to help. time to wrap up the are that was and look forward to things to come, all straight ahead on "bloomberg