TCG Blog

Twelve years ago, the satellite guys needed a better mouse trap in order to lure cable subscribers to their nascent, all-digital video services.

The same holds true for today’s telephone companies, namely, AT&T and Verizon, as they venture into a television jungle heretofore controlled solely by those satellite guys (with their 29 million video subscribers), and by the cable guys (with their 63 million video and “bundle” subs, when you count voice, audio-video and telephony services).

There’s an awful lot of turmoil surrounding the U.S. multichannel video (MCV) and related industries these days, which raises an obvious question for readers attuned to consumer electronics (CE): What does that future hold for the CE industry, especially sales at retail?

The first annual ISIS-NYC, circa 2006, is an opportune time to address one of the satellite industry’s premier developments, albeit one that has not yet occurred. That event is the pending sale of Rupert Murdoch’s controlling interest in DirecTV to his opponent and sometimes ally, Liberty Media’s Dr. John Malone. That transfer of ownership will mean a lot of change for the satellite industry and for consumers across the multichannel universe.

Did former AT&T CEO Michael Armstrong have it right when he risked his career on the idea of melding telephone voice services with audio-video and 2-way broadband Internet? Put another way, Is modern day VoIP really such an awe-inspiring service and development? The answers are yes, yes (and, partly, no). 

Most analyzing the recent U.S. district court decision requiring EchoStar to cease delivering what in industry parlance are called Distant Network Signals (DNS), on December 4, to an estimated 800,000 DNS subscribers, believe it is a simple battle of EchoStar versus the broadcasters, courts and Congress. Yet closer analysis reveals the real burr in Charlie Ergen’s DNS saddle is his longtime nemesis, the Fox-like News Corp. chairman, Rupert Murdoch. 

For a couple of years now, our family has been watching HD. Often, when we turn on our TV set, we look at the HD channel first. We have learned to look at the CBS Network HDTV broadcasts of linear (or real time) programming, as well as the sports, such as ESPN HD, and basic fare, such as Discovery HD. Like a lot of HD viewers, seeing something in HD makes a lot of sense, because it takes normal analog or standard definition video up several levels, making any programming that much more enjoyable, and some programming truly remarkable. 

These days, TV’s new, advanced technological devices are entering the retail chain about once every 45 days, pushing aside older, outdated gadgets and devices. Some devices make it, most of them don’t. And only a rare few become culture icons. One of the last major TV-related consumer electronics (CE) breakthroughs came in 1998, when TiVo launched its revolutionary Digital Video Recorder (DVR) product to much consumer – and industry—fanfare.

Last week, The Carmel Group spent a good deal of time learning about a company that is rumored to be a candidate to work with DirecTV and/or EchoStar, as both satellite TV companies try to build their joint or separate telecommunications bundles. These would be bundles of three key services: video, voice and Internet. What DirecTV and EchoStar need are terrestrial voice and 2-way Internet broadband services that they each (or together) can manage, control and from which they can reap the key rewards. 

Eleven years ago, at The Carmel Group’s inaugural Five Burning Questions conference in southern CA, an anonymous attendee stated a “law” that has since proved itself repeatedly: If you do not attend certain conferences regularly (even if you read the trades and talk regularly to peers), you will remain at least six months behind the latest industry developments.