As an independent provider of C-band and Ku-band satellite space segment, The SpaceConnection serves as "sort of a tripwire" for the satellite industry, says president and CEO Mike Antonovich. The company’s main focus is selling satellite space segment and offering a full array of transmission services through a network of strategic partners. This position as a broker reseller of space segment from most of the globe’s largest satellite fleets leaves it uniquely positioned to read the shifts in the business. "You might consider us as ‘canaries in the satellite coal mine,’ one of the first to know when the markets are moving," Antonovich says. "We’re closer to the street than most of the carriers are, as we deal directly with emerging opportunities and with tier 2- and tier 3-type clients. We find many smaller companies and new niche opportunities before the operators do."
Antonovich has nearly 30 years of satellite industry sales, marketing and operations experience, working for nearly two decades with PanAmSat before joining The SpaceConnection. He spoke with Via Satellite Editor Jason Bates about the future of The SpaceConnection and the transponder market as a whole.
VIA SATELLITE: What is the state of the occasional use business?
ANTONOVICH: All of the carriers have relationships with the major broadcasters, and those broadcasters have insisted that the carriers maintain an occasional use inventory to support live news, sports and breaking events. The commitment to the satellite industry has been pretty strong from the broadcasting community. Technologies have changed, but fundamentally, it has been a robust business for The SpaceConnection. For more than 20 years we’ve provisioned the itinerant use of satellite capacity for customers, essentially "making it up on volume." We start virtually every day losing money, but on balance and over a long period of time, the capacity we have for occasional use has been profitable.
VIA SATELLITE: What drives your business growth today?
ANTONOVICH: There are a couple of interesting trends. The live contribution of sports and news material is moving quickly towards high-definition television. The most efficient way to do that is using the new MPEG-4 standard, moving away from MPEG-2. Coupled with the latest generation modulation equipment, broadcasters are squeezing a great deal more signal into the same or smaller bandwidth. Of course, there is still a great deal of news and sports done at MPEG-2 because it’s deployed, available and robust, but as we see news organizations move towards high definition, they will need the bandwidth and cost savings of going to MPEG-4.
We are also starting to see more deployment of automated on-demand type of systems. This trend has been coming for about six years, but there have been fits and starts in getting the technologies right and getting the cost models right. Over the next 18 months, we see a lot of drivers for automated access, auto acquisition antennas and automated booking systems. The promise has been there for a while, but we are starting to see meaningful movement in this area. Everyone from local TV stations to government and disaster and emergency response providers are looking to save time, money and manpower in gaining access to satellite bandwidth. They want to be more efficient, more economical. A lot of the mechanical steps involved in ordering, accessing, provisioning and using bandwidth need to be squeezed out to make the system more efficient.
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