Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Loves the Senate

Yesterday, the Senate voted to push back the cut-off date for digital television until June. Unfortunately, the delay won’t leave some consumers in the dark. Television stations will have the option to delay the conversion, or proceed as planned on Feb. 17 ­– meaning they can shut down their antenna as soon as they want.

Either way, the result will be that same eventually. And it’s a positive one for digital television outlets. In fact, we were discussing the impact of the digital television conversion just last week.

The longer this conversion process goes, the longer an unofficial ad-campaign for digital television providers like satellite and cable will continue. We’ve already discussed how this “conversion talk” is good business for Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA), Cablevision Systems (NYSE: CVC), The DIRECTV Group (NYSE: DTV) and Dish Network (Nasdaq: DISH).

But we should also add Verizon (NYSE: VZ) to that list. It saw it’s fourth-quarter profit jump by 15%. And if we look a little closer at the figures, we’ll see they added 303,000 fiber television subscribers – a record which brings their total digital TV subscribers to 1.9 million.

You can’t credit a 19% customer increase in one quarter to the power of an advertising department. Instead, you can thank the good members of the Senate for padding our digital providers’ bank accounts until June – and possibly longer at the rate they’re going.

There’s a relevant analogy in Wag the Dog, of “changing horses in mid-stream.” Let’s just hope that someone in the advertising department at Verizon doesn’t think it was the strength of their ad campaign that brought those customers in.

Companies mentioned in this article: CMCSA, CVC, DTV, DISH and VZ.