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High Definition Television (HDTV) is an exciting new technology and Dish Network Satellite TV has been an industry leader when it comes to delivering an astounding number of channels that take advantage of this great new TV format.
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AT&T May Drop Dish, But Still Has U-verse
AT&T has decided not to renew its contract to resell television services provided by Dish Networks. The announcement, made last night in a filing from Dish with the SEC, have sent shares of the satellite company tumbling and analysts rushing to point out that this may not be the end for Dish and AT&T. My question is, why not? Where the heck is AT&T’s belated IPTV service?
Several analysts said that AT&T’s refusal to automatically renew the five-year-old contract means the telco will try to negotiate a better deal by bringing Dish rival DirectTV to the table. Others say this kills any hope that AT&T might buy Dish. But Dish has been a stopgap measure to give AT&T a triple play of voice, data and video as the cable guys encroached on the voice business. AT&T has always wanted to offer its own video service.
Six years ago I sat through demos of AT&T’s Project Lightspeed (now Homezone) and marveled at the coming television service options ahead. By that measure I’ve spent a fifth of my life waiting for U-verse as it worked through technical hurdles and issues with the Microsoft platform. And only now is the service getting widely rolled out. Dare I hope that AT&T is actually getting close to owning its own triple play?
Right now, according to an emailed response from an AT&T spokesman, “U-verse TV is our primary offering in the areas where it is available, but AT&T | DISH is available across our footprint.” As U-verse expands, losing the AT&T contract may not be such a blow.
June 19: What’s Interesting This Morning
It’s another beautiful day in the San Francisco Bay area, though unfortunately it’s going to be spent indoors, in meetings, as we plan for our Structure 08 conference. Almost everyone in the company except Stacey is going to be in the office, and that means a hectic and challenging day. Thankfully there is no SF Giants game today, so we won’t have any crazy onlookers walking past our digs. Anyway, here are some interesting links that might be worth checking out:
- The Wall Street Journal reports that AT&T wants DISH to pay back $500 million in convertible notes, a move that indicates the partners might be on the verge of breaking up. Of course, it also indicates that AT&T has no interest in buying DISH anymore. WSJ points out that DirecTV has leveraged the HDTV trend better than DISH. The growth in the satellite industry has almost halved. AT&T’s move shouldn’t come as a surprise — they have to grow their IPTV business, and fast.
- France is going to ban illegal Internet downloaders, according to Times UK Online. So much for the great, technology-friendly President Sarkozy. He’s joined the likes of Universal’s CEO, in my book — people who don’t quite understand the real issues around the Internet and believe in strongarming.
- Apparently the guys at PPLive have no such problems. Meet the Asian Joost, which is cranking out some big numbers and is on the prowl to buy its way into the U.S. market.
- Amidst all its misery, Motorola has something to celebrate. Its GPON division has found two new buyers, even if they are microscopic in size.
- Are you a Wi-Fi thief? The answer is yes. Seriously, I’m not joking about that.
- More Free SMS for you…and I mean FREE. You know how much I love free SMS services. Today, the folks at 3Jam have introduced a new service that would allow you to send and receive free SMS messages. It’s also context-aware. It’s still in beta, and the first 100 GigaOM readers can try it. I think this one could catch on. Watch how it works on YouTube.
- By the way, did you know that men like the mobile web and constitute 88.1 percent of total web users? Or so claims Opera. I think that would be that 88.1 percent of Opera users are men. Nearly 14.7 million used their Opera Mini to browse the web. Great, though not as much fun as iPhone browsing. I use it for checking out WAP.MLB.COM — all the time!
- There is a growing army of people who, like me, stumble into becoming web workers, which isn’t as easy as it seems.
- And if all that seems frivolous, then it is frivolous. Check out this report on Earth2Tech, which points out that our planet’s climate change problems are worse than previously thought. This comes from a group of highly respected, Nobel Prize-winning scientists.
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Before I sign off, I just wanted to get your feedback on this “interesting” post — if you like it or not, should I carry on or not, or perhaps how best to improve it. I have embedded a little poll for a spot test.
Hacking a Smart Card with Acetone and Nitric Acid…
Here’s a great video explaining the works behind hacking a smart card.
Looks like it’s a very dangerous process, much more dangerous than making methamphetamine.
Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode
SAN DIEGO — Christopher Tarnovsky feels vindicated. The software engineer and former satellite-TV pirate has been on the hot seat for five years, accused of helping his former employer, a Rupert Murdoch company, sabotage a rival to gain the top spot in the global pay-TV wars.
But two weeks ago a jury in the civil lawsuit against that employer, NDS Group, largely cleared the company — and by extension Tarnovsky — of piracy, finding NDS guilty of only a single incident of stealing satellite signals, for which Dish was awarded $1,500 in damages.
[via hackedgadgets - hackaday - flylogic - wired]
EchoStar Falls Once Again To Tivo, Says It Will Keep Fighting
EchoStar (now known as DISH Network Corporation) was dealt yet another blow in its ongoing patent battle with Tivo as the U.S. Appeals Court ruled against them. The dispute involves EchoStar’s alleged infringement of Tivo’s TimeWarp patent, which allows users to record one program while watching another. Tivo applied for the patent in 1998, and it was granted in 2001.
In 2004 Tivo successfully sued EchoStar for its Dish Network DVR, which provided very similar functionality to Tivo’s product. EchoStar was ordered to pay Tivo $73.9M in damages. The company has subsequently appealed the ruling a number of times, but has not been successful in getting it overturned.
The Dish Network has advised customers that the latest rulings will have no effect on their DVR service, stating that they have deployed “next-generation DVR software” that will not infringe on Tivo’s patent. The company has also declared that it intends to appeal the latest ruling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Dish has a lot more lawyer money than TiVo, and it is going to drag this thing out as long as it can.
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection was the first site to report the news.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
SiRF Cuts Jobs, Wipes Out Mobile TV
GPS chip maker SiRF Technology has reduced first-quarter sales estimates and implemented a cost-savings plan that will cost about 50 people their jobs and result in the closure of SiRF’s offices in Stockholm and South San Francisco. Aside from general economic malaise softening demand for personal navigation systems, the other whammy for SiRF was a lousy mobile-TV market. According to the release, it’s getting out of the market altogether.
“Although SiRF has made considerable progress on the development of its mobile TV technology, the market for mobile TV has been slow to ramp up. In view of this, the Company has stopped further product developments in the mobile TV space and will focus its efforts on its core business.”
Much of the data has pointed to this, but companies, such as Broadcom, which has pushed its mobile TV chips into higher-volume production and Dish Networks, which recently bid $712 million for spectrum that can be used for mobile television, still haven’t gotten the memo. Either they can afford to play now at a loss, in hopes of a slow market eventually arriving, or they know something we don’t.
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And Now InDirecTV
The lack of a broadband pipe and the subsequent inability to offer video on demand is the proverbial glass jaw of John Malone’s satellite broadcasting service, DirecTV. While the broadband dilemma is likely to continue for a while, DirecTV has come up with a workaround for the VOD problem. Given that the company has been talking about this for nearly two-and-a-half years, don’t blame me for being skeptical. Skepticism or not, it’s a kludgy workaround.
DirecTV is going to stream videos over broadband pipes to its set-top box; the videos will then be shown on the television set. They will also send pre-selected video content, mostly popular movies and TV shows from the satellite, and store it on the hard disk inside the set-top box.
The problem is that streaming via the web is an inexact science that, at best, will deliver a patchy performance. If the streams are going to match the HD-quality videos that satellite customers are accustomed to, then that broadband pipe is going to be filling up pretty fast. Forget Network Neutrality. Imagine how ticked off you’ll be when your home email access slows to a crawl because someone’s watching “America’s Next Top Model.”
DirecTV and other such satellite TV services are extremely popular in areas where cable access is hard to come by, which means they’re also the kind of locales where broadband access (of any kind) has its own set of problems. As analyst Bruce Leichtman told The Wall Street Journal:
“If I have to wait 40 minutes to watch an episode of ‘The Sopranos,’ that is not really on-demand… That takes away from the impulsive nature of on-demand and loses a large purpose of the service…People are possessive of their DVR space and don’t really want stuff pushed on them.”
The whole thing has a dĂ©jĂ vu feeling to it. Check out these reports from 2005, 2006 and 2007, all of which pretty much say the same thing. There’s nothing about what DirecTV is doing to convince me that it’ll work this time around.
Still, wanting to give folks from DirecTV a chance to state their side of the story, I emailed them yesterday (now over 30 hours ago) hoping to get some clarifications as to how the system would work. Among the questions I asked were what bandwidth requirements the stream had, what the bare minimum speed requirement was and if the video playback was going to be instantaneous. I also asked about the technologies they were using for both broadband and satellite delivery of the content, and how much space on the disk drives they plan to carve up for the downloaded content. So far, no reply!
Their lack of response is telling: What they have is a beta that has been almost three years in the making and whether it will work on a large scale remains to be seen. I wouldn’t hold my breath!
EchoStar Now DISH Network — Spins Off SlingBox, Set-Top Biz
EchoStar, the satellite broadcasting company, is finally changing its name to DISH Network, according to a filing with the SEC. Why the change? EchoStar wants its name to truly reflect its true business. It is also planning to spin off some of its businesses, and that spin-off will be called EchoStar Holding Co. (EHC), a move we had mused about earlier. Charlie Ergen is going to be chairman and CEO of both companies. EHC had sales of over a billion dollars and a profit of about $32 million for first six months of 2007, on a pro forma basis.
EHC will primarily have two lines of business:
Set-top boxes: EchoStar has a hardware business that makes set-top boxes that are sold primarily to DISH Network, but also to some international customers. In 2006, this division shipped about nine million set-top boxes. In October, EchoStar acquired Sling Media for about $380 million, and Sling Media is going to be part of EHC.
We believe our separation from ECC may enhance our opportunities to sell set-top boxes to a broader group of multi-channel video distributors. Historically, certain multi-channel video distributors have perceived us as a competitor due to our affiliation with ECC.
In other words, don’t be surprised if the company starts selling boxes to cable operators and other DBS companies.
Fixed Satellite Services: EchoStar owns (or leases) nine satellites and seven digital broadcast centers. It also has a fiber-optic network that has points of presence in 150 cities. This could mean that the company is going to start leasing capacity to other players, not just EchoStar.
The spin-off certainly sets up interesting scenarios: For instance, DISH can now be easily gobbled up by AT&T, though their deal is supposedly on the rocks. Another option is that DISH could aggressively bid on 700 MHz wireless spectrum, win some spectrum, and then offer some sort of a new broadband-enabled satellite TV service. A lot to think about, and of course a reason to make some calls.
