The comments came during a Thursday call on Ergen and other Dish executives took questions about the company’s latest earnings results, which fell short of analysts’ expectations.

While most of the call was dedicated to Dish’s high stakes bid for Sprint, which would give it the chance to offer mobile-broadband-TV packages, analysts also asked Ergen about his company’s ongoing spat with broadcasters. In recent months, Dish has incensed the networks by selling “the Hopper,” a popular product to skip commercials, and touched off rumors that it might buy Aereo, which allows viewers to watch TV on their phones for $8 a month.

On today’s call, however, Ergen sounded more conciliatory.

“We admire what [Aereo is] doing. We indirectly get a benefit as it puts downward pressure on retransmission consent fees.. But all things being equal, we’d prefer to work with the broadcasters,” he said. The broadcasters are equipped to do something themselves. We’re more likely to work with existing partners.”

The rhetoric is part of a complicated dance between pay TV providers, including Dish, and content owners over the spiraling cost of programming; in this struggle, services like the Hopper and Aereo have become a source of leverage for Dish.

On the call, Ergen repeated his call for smaller cable “bundles” and more a la carte offerings.

“At the end of the day, if the bundle price gets too high, [consumers] will find other ways to do it — they’ll use small antennas, they’ll steal programming.”

Ergen added that he believes the traditional dual stream model for TV, consisting of subscription and advertising revenue, will continue thanks to new mobile opportunities. In particular, he said that mobile viewing opened the prospect of valuable local-based ad targeting that will result in tailored ads being delivered to the living room, tablets and smartphones.

He added that some “forward looking broadcasters” were already on board in exploring new bundle opportunities with Dish.

“I’ve never met a programmer or broadcaster that was against making more money.”

The stats come by way of research group TDG which presented the findings in this chart:

While a five percent decline is hardly earth-shaking, TDG describes the end of cable TV’s growth as a tipping point with ”long-term tectonic implications.”

This makes sense. The price of cable bundles is climbing ever higher, at the same time as a bevy of new distribution options is increasing consumer frustration at having to purchase channels they don’t want. Meanwhile, a rising generation of “cord-nevers” thinks buying a cable package to watch one show makes as much sense as buying a CD to hear a single song.

But don’t count out the TV industrial complex just yet. The industry still has the best content goodies, including sports and HBO fare, and will continue forcing consumers to buy bundles to access them. It will also keep dangling cable passwords as a requirement for people to watch content on mobile devices.

Meanwhile, the brave new world of cord-cutting is still not ready for primetime. As my colleague Stacey Higginbotham explained, the online video world still has too many parts and too little accountability – meaning consumers will be stuck with unreliable service for some time to come. The first cable decline is a tipping point, not a revolution.

(Image by lev dolgachov via Shutterstock)

“Google Inc. is reinventing the business of pay TV and broadband — and it may not need to wire every U.S. city to make an impact,” wrote SNL Kagan analys Deborah Yao, in the report’s lead.

Also read: The economics of Google Fiber and what it means for U.S. broadband

Two weeks ago, in Kansas City, Mo., Google launched a new fiber-based broadband and video service.

For $120 a month, subscribers get uncapped internet access that’s 172 times faster than the national average. They get a 2 terabyte DVR, capable of recording up to 500 hours of programming and eight shows at one time. And they get an as yet incomplete but growing selection of basic cable channels, albeit one that currently lacks such powerful draws as Disney’s ESPN, News Corp.’s Fox News and AMC.

The research company quoted Moody’s investment analyst Gerald Granovsky, who said that even with an astounding $45 billion of cash on hand, Google lacks the resources to accomplish the staggeringly expensive task of rolling out its fiber nationally.

“They don’t have the cash for it,” Granovsky said. “We would be shocked if they were to expand this.”

But as SNL Kagan insinuates, Google — which spent $500 million to bring its Fiber to Kansas City — might just try. Quoting our own Stacey Higginbotham, the research group noted Google’s belief that it won’t lose money in Kansas City, with a customer-required $300 connection fee covering deployment cost.

SNL Kagan added that Google cut expenses by building its own set tops and running its fiber over aerial power lines instead of cutting them into the ground.

Also notable: Verizon spent $23 billion to bring FiOS fiber to 17 million homes.

“One could argue that Google may not have to wire every U.S. city, but just enough cities for pay TV operators to start changing their behavior,” reads the SNL Kagan report. “As Google proves that it can offer a superior product at lower prices, regulators could pressure cable and telecom operators to do the same.

According to the research group (and as previously noted by GigaOM) Time Warner Cable — the largest multichannel operator in Kansas City, with a 33.9 percent market share — is so concerned about Google Fiber, it’s offering employees $50 gift cards for tips about the service.

Not really, says Bernstein Research senior analyst Craig Moffett. On Monday, he issued a report to media investors, boiling down what appears to be a net video customer loss incurred by cable, satellite and telco services in the second quarter as a normal cycle for maturing businesses.

Also read: Pay TV stops growing – Top 4 services all lost users in Q2

It happens every year, Moffett told us Monday afternoon when we queried him via email about the memo. “Customers — including colleges — disconnect for the summer and then reconnect in September,” he explained.

Well, to be more specific, these net losses have happened every year recently.

It started in Q2 2010, when the pay TV industry reported a net loss of 216,000 video subscribers, according to SNL Kagan, its first quarterly net video customer loss ever. This decline — which was followed up by a 119,00 net loss in the third quarter of 2010 — was largely put down to economic factors at the time.

The industry finished 2010 in the black, but once again featured a down second quarter in  2011.

For Q2 2012, the top four pay TV operators — Comcast, DirecTV, Dish Network and Time Warner Cable — reported collective video user losses of 407,000. This decline exceeded the gains (322,000 users) of still-growing telco services AT&T U-Verse and Verizon FiOS.

The final number of net subscriber losses will probably exceed 100,000 once all major cable services report their second quarter performances (Cablevision, for example, is set to report its Q2 financials Tuesday).

It was only the second time that both satellite operators (DirecTV and Dish) reported user losses in the same quarter.

Really, this has nothing to do with the proliferation of over-the-top services like Netflix? After all, with nearly 24 million streaming subscribers acquired within just the last 24 months, Netflix has more video users now than any multichannel operator.

“It’s tempting to read this as the beginning of the end, as ‘Cable Strikes Back’ (or even ‘Cord Cutting Gets Real’) or something similar. But we believe the dip is better viewed as merely the latest data point in a long glide path to market share equilibrium for the Pay TV sector,” Moffett wrote.

As the newer satellite and telco components of the pay TV business mature, he added, they become more “seasonally sensitive.”

“In any churn-based business, a growing subscriber base exerts a commensurately growing drag on future subscriber growth,” Moffett further explained. “Gross additions stay roughly constant, losses to churn rise … and net addition growth slows.”

Below is a chart Moffett included in his memo, showing how DirecTV and Dish are approaching leveled off subscriber growth in the U.S. as time goes on.

The top 10 publicly traded operators of cable, satellite and telecommunications-based pay TV services added 494,000 video subscribers in the first quarter, according to data compiled by paidContent from Q1 earnings reports.

That represents just 54 percent of the quarter-to-quarter growth reported by these companies in Q1 2009, when the U.S. was mired in recession.

Earlier in the week, Sanford Bernstein senior analyst Craig Moffett released data indicating the total subscriber gain to be only around 422,000 — in addition to the hard data released by public companies, Moffett also surveyed private multi-channel operators like Cox Communications, as well as numerous smaller cable systems. (Apparently, these smaller companies are reporting continued subscriber losses.)

As we’ve stated in the past, the slowing doesn’t seem to be connected so much to a rampant cord-cutting, but rather a slowing of the telecommunications-based component of the business. For example, telecom operators Verizon and AT&T, which collectively added 583 video subscribers to their respective FiOS and U-Verse services in the first quarter of 2009, only added 380,000 this last Q1 period.