With cable companies raising their prices to the point where many families are looking for alternatives, satellite cable companies are seeing some great success in their bottom lines. DishNetwork is one company that has been working hard to reel in new subscribers. And that hard work seems to have paid off, after some struggles early last year. The company just announced that their new subscriber numbers for the first quarter of 2012 were a little better than industry analysts expected. 

Dish Network had actually angered quite a few of their subscribers in 2011 by raising their own prices, and at one point actually saw as many as 250,000 subscribers leave. In what turned out to be the second straight quarter of growth. Dish says it raked in more than 104,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2012. That is quite a bit higher than the 62,000 subscribers that were expected by those in the know. More good news for the company was that their number of subscriber cancellations, or churn rate dropped to 1.35 percent. That is an improvement over churn rates in the first quarter of 2011 that were sitting at 1.47 percent.

Not all the news was as good as it could have been however. Dish Network did fall short of its revenue projects, rising just 11 percent to $358 million. That was slightly under the $360 million that most industry analysts predicted. These revenue numbers struggled a bit despite the fact that Dish has taken steps to make itself stand out among its competitors with devices such as the Hopper, a whole home DVR system.

"It's a challenging environment with increased pricing pressure but you are seeing Dish execute better than last year," said,Brean Murray analyst, Todd Mitchell.

Dish is also trying to get into the mobile applications market, but the company says it is still waiting for FCC (News - Alert) approval before it can move into that sector. Should it get that final government approval, it could be quite the silver bullet in its gun.