VIA SATELLITE: Are the larger carriers trying to become more active in your domain?
ANTONOVICH: That’s not where the trend is. The big carriers really enjoy large, predictable customers. They can’t predict what 400 smaller customers will do. They would rather manage what five very large customers would do. We deal with customers they, quite frankly, are well not suited to deal with.
Increasingly, there are fewer clients who have enough in-house demand to justify fulltime leases. Many of the broadcasters are reducing the amount of occasional use inventory on their own books and are relying more on The SpaceConnection and others to provide that. We have a very large group of customers that make us their first call. One of our advantages is our knowledge of our customers and our level of personal commitment to them is different than what they receive from the large monolithic carriers. Of course, there are also any number of customers that come to us only for price due to our volume commitments. In some markets, like Africa and the Middle East, we’re the last call for folks because everyone is looking for inventory and there is a true scarcity. We’re a source for customers in that part of the world due to our more informal sources of bandwidth. We really do know lots of people in lots of places, and there is still a value in that knowledge and intelligence, and that’s one of our strengths.
VIA SATELLITE: Are you moving toward providing more than just bandwidth?
ANTONOVICH: I think we will get to more of a "solution sale" rather than just a bandwidth sale. It’s unclear whose capital it will be, because everyone operates differently. Local stations tend to have a capital budget for satellite newsgathering gear and they like to spend it on hardware and then buy the bandwidth separately, but it could be a pooled type of a managed solution. Or the users can be like state and federal governments that want a "soup to nuts" bundled solutions — maintenance, installation and the like. We see the model adapting to the priorities of each market. Broadcasters are more hands on and technical, while enterprise and government users are more hands off.
The trick, of course, is you can’t be all things to all people. You have to know where you add real value. We have a great many partners up and down the value chain who can do some of these things a lot better than we can. It’s a case of marketing the right solution, not necessarily inventing it. The challenge for the satellite industry as a whole is to maintain relevance in the way our customers use satellite.
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