Swanni's Rants & Raves, Volume 3

[Gregg Lengling]

Rave
DIRECTV announced last week that it's launching four new satellites
designed to increase its national and local High-Definition TV
lineups. For instance, as early as mid-2005, the satcaster says, it
should be able to provide up to 500 local channels in high-def. This is
great news for the HDTV industry; DIRECTV has more than 13
million subscribers and now many of them will be more likely to buy
a high-def set.

However, this is bad news for DIRECTV's chief rival, EchoStar. The
nation's second largest satellite TV service will have to find a way to
increase its capacity for local HD -- and fast. Look for EchoStar to
approach Cablevision about buying its struggling Voom satellite
service. (As first predicted nearly a year ago by yours truly.) With
Voom's satellite fleet, EchoStar could quickly expand its high-def
lineup.

The announcement is even worse news for the cable TV industry.
Cable operators have heavily promoted the fact that the satellite
industry can not currently offer local HD. But next year, that weapon
will be gone.

Rant
DIRECTV's decision to add local HDTV could not come at a better
time. The satellite TV service has attempted to pacify some high-def
owners by offering HDTV feeds of CBS and NBC in cities in which
the local affiliates are owned by the network. (The East Coast feed
comes from the NBC station in New York; the West Coast feed
comes from Los Angeles.) However, the local HD service is spotty at
best.

For instance, DIRECTV today added the NBC high-def feed. Living in
the Washington, D.C. area, where the local NBC station is owned by
the network, I thought I would get the signal. However, I was told by
the company's Customer Service department that I would need a
waiver from the local station because I lived in Arlington, VA, which is
five miles away from DC. Thinking that didn't sound right, I called
Customer Service back three times, but got a busy signal each time
after first hearing a recording of Oscar de la Hoya promoting his
Saturday night Pay-Per-View fight against Bernard Hopkins.

Bottom line: DIRECTV better hope that those HDTV satellites are
successfully launched -- and they need to re-evaluate its customer
service operation. Now.

A DIRECTV spokesman told me later that the satcaster is unable to
provide the high-def feed if a second non-network owned station is
within a certain number of miles from the primary area. (This is
federal law; not DIRECTV policy, by the way.) For instance, in my
case, Baltimore, which does not have a NBC-owned affiliate, is
roughly 50 miles from Washington, D.C. So I would need to get a
waiver from the Baltimore NBC station to watch a high-def feed of the
NBC station in New York from my home in suburban Washington,
D.C.

Sound complicated? You bet and, again, it's why DIRECTV
desperately needs those four new satellites.
http://www.tvpredictions.com/rants091604.html