Opinion ID: 77316
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: PrimeTime 24 Subscribers

Text: 20 In an effort to dissuade the district court from issuing the original injunction in this case, EchoStar's CEO, Charles Ergen, made a formal pledge under penalty of perjury in September 1999. In that pledge, he promised that for each of the subscribers that had originally been signed up for EchoStar's distant network programming using the subjective PrimeTime 24 method, EchoStar would (1) determine if they were served or unserved using the ILLR method and (2) terminate all ineligible subscribers. To comply with this promise, EchoStar submitted a list of its 331,586 PrimeTime 24 subscribers to Decisionmark, an ILLR vendor, for an ILLR analysis. EchoStar received the analysis the following month. 21 The analysis revealed that of the 331,586 total subscribers signed up for distant network programming with EchoStar pursuant to the agreement with PrimeTime 24, the percentages of Grade A subscribers were 61% (ABC), 60% (CBS), 58% (Fox), and 60% (NBC). 15 These totals amount to more than 258,000 former PrimeTime 24 subscribers (approximately 78% of the total) who were predicted to receive a Grade A signal from at least one of the four networks. Contrary to Ergen's promise, the district court found no evidence that EchoStar terminated service to any of these subscribers for compliance-related purposes. CBS Broad., Inc., 276 F.Supp.2d at 1245-46. 22