Dish, T-Mobile could be perfect pairing

Sometimes you look at a courting couple and wonder: What could they possibly see in each other? Or ponder: How will they make this last?

Then there's Dish Networks and T-Mobile, the second-largest satellite TV company and the fourth-biggest mobile phone provider in the United States, respectively. In this case, all the rumblings about a potential marriage, now heating to a near-boil, make perfect sense.

Both Dish and T-Mobile are "we try harder" underdogs that have built their reputations as low-cost providers, always ready to take great risks to gain market share.

"If it's not fun, it's not worth doing," Dish founder Charlie Ergen once told this reporter with a laugh, back in his early 1980s days running the satellite company (then called EchoStar Corp.) as a "mom and pop" operation with his wife. Ergen first made waves with large-dish satellite systems that offered free, unscrambled access to network and pay channel feeds - much to the consternation of content owners but to the delight of farmers and exurbanites with lots of land and no cable access. Ergen bundled those EchoStar dishes and receivers for as little as $3,000 - a third the price of competitors.

In recent years, the Dish brand has continued to rock the boat with small-dish system innovations like the "Prime Time Anytime" and "AutoHop" recording features, allowing customers to automatically record all prime time programming, then cut out the commercials on replay. Much fuss also has been made over the company's cheap, "slim-bundle" Internet streaming service Sling TV.

Ergen is notorious for playing hardball with channel suppliers at contract renegotiations (and as a great card player). And he's lately been buying up frequency spectrum like nobody's business, working with small partner companies to achieve bidding advantages, making folks wonder, "What's he up to next?" The prevailing thought: creating an alternative means of delivering video channels to on-the-go users who'd rather watch TV on their phone, laptop, or tablet.

Steered by equally feisty CEO John Legere, T-Mobile has built a name and market share as the "un-carrier" company. It has done so by slashing monthly service rates, buying would-be customers out of contracts with other providers, and encouraging consumers to buy phones outright to achieve lower monthly deals. T-Mobile also has been a pioneer in rollover minutes and free international calling. (It is owned primarily by Germany's Deutsche Telekom.) And T-Mobile was out in front with WiFi calling at home and in hot spots as a way to bring stable service to mobile customers in locations like apartment and office buildings where the cell service stinks.

So here they are, Dish and T-Mobile, negotiating a marriage of near-equals: T-Mobile has a market capitalization of about $31 billion; Dish's is $33 billion. Ergen would become the company's chairman, Legere the CEO, market sources say.

Both companies have been down this road before. Dish bid unsuccessfully for Sprint Corp. and Clearwire Corp. two years ago. T-Mobile acquired Metro PCS in 2013, then was close to combining with Sprint last year until federal regulators indicated they would block the deal.