SATELLITE NEWS: In Japan, Toshiba announced that Mobile Broadcasting Corp. will cease operations. Have satellite operators perhaps overstated the opportunities in the mobile broadcast market?
OLMSTEAD: Absolutely not. In some ways, it is good to see. We always talk about competitive markets. Some people make it and some people don’t. It is great when you see Charlie Ergen make it with Dish, but that is only one story. On the Japan side, Toshiba gave it a try and it did not work out.
If we look at the Korean side, where we have investments, subscriber ramp-up has been slow for a period of time, but that was after Tu Media had grown to 1.3 million mobile video subscribers. We are very excited about some changes taking place in that business and very bullish about it. Korea is a dense market and satellite has been going head to head with terrestrial. Terrestrial had significant advantages and satellite still captured 1.3 million paying subscribers. When we look at Korea and Japan, what this tells us is that there is tremendous opportunity out there for mobile video, but you have to get it right and it won’t be guaranteed.
SATELLITE NEWS: Are there going to be more investments in new satellites?
OLMSTEAD: What I can say is our shareholder wants to grow the business. There are lots of opportunities to grow the business. I would expect that between replacement satellites and growth satellites, you will see we will continue to buy satellites on a fairly regular basis.
VIA SATELLITE: How do you view the Ka-band and broadband opportunity?
OLMSTEAD: We are engaged in satellite broadband in a couple of ways. Dish is a pretty good distributor of WildBlue today. Dish is happy to offer the additional capability to Dish subscribers who are typically not in DSL areas. The broadband business has been moving along at a pretty steady pace. We are well pleased with it. We think that it has good legs going forward. In addition, on all three of our classic FSS satellites, we have Ka-band payloads. One of those is not very good for residential broadband services, but the other two are. You should expect to see those being better utilized in the future. We will continue to monitor broadband. We think it is a viable market. We will participate in it, at least in one part of the value chain, maybe in multiple ways.
VIA SATELLITE: How do you see the traditional broadcast market developing in the United States?
OLMSTEAD: What we are seeing is that as technology facilitates it, people are willing to consume video anytime and anywhere.... At EchoStar we are trying to make that possible for them.
Email
Comments
Print
Reuse
