Satellite Today: What is your view of satellite’s place in the mobile TV market?
McGlade: I think one thing we can do, and are successfully doing, is delivering video content to cellular towers. We have had great success with our support of the MediaFLO USA network deployment where we provided satellite bandwidth and connectivity to the MediaFLO USA transmitter sites for carriage of wireless multimedia distribution capacity, making it available to wireless operators in the United States. I don’t see as much of a driver for applications direct to peoples’ handsets. Given the robust infrastructure of the C-, Ku- and Ka-band FSS offerings, we are today in a stronger position to grow mobile applications by working with partners to address markets such as the maritime, automotive, aviation and even rail. S-band to me is more speculative. We will watch and see how this develops over time.
Satellite Today: Verizon has more than 1 million TV subscribers. Will they continue down the partnership route with DBS players or could they go it alone and add the satellite part themselves?
McGlade: In the United States, the telcos have combined offerings with the DTH providers. Verizon has the quadruple play. They can bundle all the services together. What the discussion has been in the United States is when Verizon or
AT&T will buy
DirecTV or
EchoStar. You never hear of them starting it on their own. A lot of telcos are network orientated. They don’t like the idea of not having a network infrastructure. It is hard for them to do it. With AT&T and Verizon being so big, they don’t have to buy EchoStar or DirecTV, they could go and do this on their own.
Satellite Today: Do you think there will be these sorts of deals where telcos will come to you and look to combine IP with satellite when offering TV?
McGlade: I would love for them to come and do that, but I think it is far more likely that the small- to medium-sized telcos will need our solution.
Satellite Today: Could your IPTV service strategy be replicated in other regions of the world?
McGlade: There is, but it is a little early. We are trying to further expand and leverage our platform in the United States. We have had interest in other parts of the world such as Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We believe the platform should be open, interoperable and upgradeable as well as MPEG-4. All these things are going into our structure and allowing our customers to pick their own middleware, security and access technologies as well as their own set-top boxes. … We are continuing to have dialogues outside of the United States, but this was the first IPTV platform we built so we want the platform to prove itself more fully before we globally expand. That, however, does not mean that if the right opportunity comes along, we would not more robustly explore non-U.S. rollout of IPTV services.
Satellite Today: Where new growth areas are others not looking into?
McGlade: People want on-demand content access at anytime. They want speed and quality, but how do you provide that? Our industry does not have something similar to CableLabs, which came up with technology, such as the DOCSIS standard for broadband, which really made a difference. This is an example. We are a smaller industry than cable TV, but certainly we could do a better job on how we could collectively leverage our technology and development and look at what could propel the industry in terms of applications.
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