The league had hopes of combining about 12.5 million AOL Time Warner cable subscribers with an equivalent number from three other cable operators -- Cablevision, Comcast and Charter -- each of which owns an N.B.A. team.
Both companies gained around 9m more subscribers over the past year, equivalent to the entire broadband subscriber base of Verizon.
In a presentation this morning in London, Olaf Swantee, EE's CEO, also says that the carrier is aiming to pass 1 million subscribers by the end of 2013, equivalent to about 8% of its overall user base, which is currently at 27 million subscribers.
The 49-cent price is roughly equivalent to what subscribers pay now, but it is more than double what the highest-tier members had been paying as recently as 18 months ago.
Analysts say the surge in station consolidation this year has also been driven by low interest rates and by an enormous rise in retransmission fees for stations, which are the equivalent of per-subscriber fees for cable channels like ESPN and MTV.
FeedBurner's subscriber count only provides the equivalent of Twitter's opaque follower count and MyBlogLog didn't solve this problem either.
Then there are the two titles' different daily tablet experiences: in Birmingham, the Business Daily is said to have several hundred subscribers and is growing, whereas Liverpool's equivalent is rumoured to have only reached double figures.
According to the GSMA Mobile Economy Report 2018, the number of unique mobile subscribers will reach 5.9 billion by 2025, equivalent to 71% of the world's population.
Cable and satellite operators pay the equivalent of 57 cents per subscriber per month for CNN, according to Derek Baine, a media analyst at SNL Kagan.
The companies say their subscribers will not be subject to the dashboard equivalent of junk e-mail and annoying pop-up ads.
