Charlie Ergen, chairman and co-founder of Dish Network, gave an hour-long keynote interview at this week’s D:Dive Into Media conference in Dana Point, California. While the discussion addressed Ergen’s take on topics such as the future of wireless and the potential of a la carte programming, host Peter Kafka focused on the Dish Network’s Hopper and the controversy surrounding ad-skipping technology.

“What’s wrong with ads? Why do you want to kill ads?” asked Kafka, to which Ergen responded: “I don’t want to kill ads. I think advertising is great, and I’m very aware that there are multiple revenue streams in television. But, I also don’t want to put my head in the sand, and I think the world is changing.”

“As a consumer, I don’t want ads that aren’t relevant,” he added. “I think Hulu’s approach is a step in the right direction, which lets you have some level of choice over the ads that you see. With the Hopper, you have the ability to target an ad. For example, a single mom may not need that testosterone ad. The broadcast industry is slow to adapt to that.”

“When we helped invent the DVR, notwithstanding what TiVo says, the world changed. It makes sense to give people more targeted ads that make sense to them — you can run fewer ads and make more money. Our vision is just to do it another way,” said Ergen.

“We aren’t allowed to change commercials — we can’t change the content of that stream, so we can’t do a targeted ad if we wanted to,” he said of the company’s ad-skipping technology. “We can’t erase the ads — even on the Hopper, the ads are still there if you flip back. The litigation that’s going on today will ultimately decide the fate of commercials. Be careful what you wish for, because if the broadcasters win, they could be in a position to block the DVR. We’ve won more than we’ve lost, but we’ve lost our fair share.”

Ergen also favors a la carte programming, “because the Internet is a la carte today and we know we have to compete there. It’s going to go there slowly, would be my guess,” he said. He notes that players such as YouTube and Amazon provide “consumers more of what they truly want, and less of what they don’t.”

Regarding his interest in the wireless space, Ergen said “we want to do video inside and outside of the house. When we got into it, though, we realized that pretty much everything is just data. If we built a network to do video, we could also do voice and broadband.”

“Ideally, we’d build a network,” he said of the spectrum Dish owns, “because all networks that already exist were built first for voice. If you built a new one today, you’d build it materially different. Because we took so long to get a license, it makes it more difficult for us. That’s probably outside of the grasp of reality, as much as we’d love to do it — so, it’s probably better to work with someone that has infrastructure. How we go about doing that, and whether we get a chance to, remains to be seen.”

For more comments from Charlie Ergen, check out the D:Dive Into Media coverage from Engadget.