TCG Blog

An essential way — and one of the best ways — “Mixed Signals” has ever seen to understand a business is to survey and understand its participants.
Thus, if one were to analyze the auto industry, one might spend a lot of time with either or both of its users and/or its executives (the latter of whom themselves are responsible to analyze and interpret the demands of their users).
In a similar context, I recently viewed an article within Multichannel News, entitled “10-Year Forecast: Cable Subs Down, Revenue Up,” written by Mike Farrell, that recounted some recent pay TV subscriber growth estimates from a firm’s presenter that stated that cable will decline to 56.8 million; satellite will increase to 34.6 million in 2014, and then decrease to its current number of 33+ million.; and telco TV will increase to 17.2 million, in the next 10 years

Recent research and investigations involving The Carmel Group suggest that more than $100 million in annual revenues are subject to being stolen by video thieves.
This is especially pertinent as it relates to program purveyors of premium (e.g., HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, and Starz) and adult programming, as well as every kind of cable network.
The theft is occurring primarily in the U.S. within Dish Network, and in Canada within Bell ExpressVu, because of their Nagra-3 conditional access card’s lack of a fix for card sharing, as well as the programmers’ frequent lack of sophistication, and certainly their lack of action.

Mixed Signals has recently completed extensive trips to Denver and Los Angeles, with several meetings focused on the familiar topic of “future trends in telecom.”
Currently, two of these trends include 1) the future of video distribution, and 2) the future of various applications in (and into) the mobile services world.

September 21, 2010
My son, Willy, 28, is a recent MBA graduate from the University of Denver, and a 2004 graduate from the University of Arizona. When it comes to U of A Wildcats football, well, let’s just say he gets even more passionate.

Indeed, this weekend, his alma mater plays mine, the University of California at Berkeley, and if his team does as well as it did this past Saturday against the University of Iowa, well, let’s just say I may not stay in the living room to watch the entire game. (My Cal lost last Saturday, to unranked Nevada, by an embarrassing sum.)

A couple of decades ago when I worked for ABC Sports, I remember frequently visiting stadiums, arenas and press boxes as part of my production jobs.
It was pretty heady stuff, being 20-years-old and gaining easy access to what seemed a pretty glamorous and focal area in any forum, i.e., where the media centered and where the press guys did their most impressive jobs.
Thus, to be a quasi formal member of the media again, now writing a regular column for New Bay Media’s Multichannel News, not only meant a new chance to enter those venues again, but also to revisit the past a bit.

September 5, 2010
In too many parts of today’s telecom worlds, including those run by Silicon Valley’s top “communications” companies — specifically Apple, Google/YouTube, and Yahoo! — they just don’t seem to properly understand what they are really doing, i.e., communicating.Moreover, they certainly don’t understand the idea of doing that in a respectful, civil, and professional manner. In short, they repeatedly and consistently act uncaringly, uncivilly, and unprofessionally toward the media, and many others.

Who They Hurt and Why
Importantly, by treating the media rudely, they are, by extension, treating consumers and the public rudely. This is because for most of the public, and many of these companies’ business peers, the media is one of their few and foremost sources of objective communication with that company or industry subsector. Whenever a timely and professional return call or email might do the trick, they simply - either purposefully or negligently, but either way, certainly unprofessionally - do not return the call/email. Or when they do, the actual response is woefully rude and/or inadequate, as noted further below. By treating the media poorly and without a lack of respect, they are, as publicly-held companies, arguably violating their duties of transparency under federal and state securities laws

August 27, 2010
“Mixed Signals” has recently completed extensive trips to Denver and Los Angeles, with several meetings focused on the familiar topic of “future trends in telecom.”

These trends include 1) the future of video distribution, and 2) the future of various applications in (and into) the mobile services world.

Video Distribution
Because a lot of money rides on the choices, many business people, and many technically-oriented business people, are asking one of the few really important telecom questions going forward: Which distribution systems — whether satellite, mobile, or fiber, or something else — are going to carry which forms and how much of tomorrow’s content? This is a critical determinant, both on the consumer side and on the business-to-business (e.g., backhaul) side.

August 12, 2010
Years ago, indeed, even decades, many looked at the Direct Broadcast Satellite industry, where they had found much of their early career development, and guessed that it would very likely be consolidating soon.

Based upon that assumption, I, too, figured that, to maintain my future in, and maintain my relevance to, the real industry I really believed in — which was the greater multichannel, pay TV industry — I would have to expand my knowledge to other areas that were similar to what DBS did.

August 5, 2010
Attacks by pirates on North American pay-TV vendors have been a serious problem for decades.

Yet there are steps and methods that pay TV operators — whether cable, telco, satellite and/or Internet-Over-The-Top (OTT) providers like Netflix, Best Buy, WalMart, and Hulu — can and must take to minimize the practice/threat of the old piracy industry adage, “What man makes, man can break.”

July 16, 2010
Perspective relative to the bigger and smaller views has always been a critical part of good business. And the U.S. TV business is no different.In the TV business, that sometimes means not only comparing yourself and your performance to others in your same class or industry subsector. It also means sometimes gauging yourself against others in other industries.

July 1, 2010
Over the years, it has always been nearly impossible to interest anyone from the large competitive telephony or cable providers to speak at DBS conferences.
Indeed, a careful review of the affiliations stated by the typical attendee suggested that few, if any, telco and/or cable folks were in those rooms, even as observers. I always found this odd. After all, how’s that old adage go: Know your friends well, your enemies better?

Did former AT&T CEO Michael Armstrong have it right when he risked his career on the idea of melding telephone voice services with audio-video and 2-way broadband Internet? Put another way, Is modern day VoIP really such an awe-inspiring service and development? The answers are yes, yes (and, partly, no).

Most analyzing the recent U.S. district court decision requiring EchoStar to cease delivering what in industry parlance are called Distant Network Signals (DNS), on December 4, to an estimated 800,000 DNS subscribers, believe it is a simple battle of EchoStar versus the broadcasters, courts and Congress. Yet closer analysis reveals the real burr in Charlie Ergen’s DNS saddle is his longtime nemesis, the Fox-like News Corp. chairman, Rupert Murdoch. 

For a couple of years now, our family has been watching HD. Often, when we turn on our TV set, we look at the HD channel first. We have learned to look at the CBS Network HDTV broadcasts of linear (or real time) programming, as well as the sports, such as ESPN HD, and basic fare, such as Discovery HD. Like a lot of HD viewers, seeing something in HD makes a lot of sense, because it takes normal analog or standard definition video up several levels, making any programming that much more enjoyable, and some programming truly remarkable.

These days, TV’s new, advanced technological devices are entering the retail chain about once every 45 days, pushing aside older, outdated gadgets and devices. Some devices make it, most of them don’t. And only a rare few become culture icons. One of the last major TV-related consumer electronics (CE) breakthroughs came in 1998, when TiVo launched its revolutionary Digital Video Recorder (DVR) product to much consumer – and industry—fanfare.

Last week, The Carmel Group spent a good deal of time learning about a company that is rumored to be a candidate to work with DirecTV and/or EchoStar, as both satellite TV companies try to build their joint or separate telecommunications bundles. These would be bundles of three key services: video, voice and Internet. What DirecTV and EchoStar need are terrestrial voice and 2-way Internet broadband services that they each (or together) can manage, control and from which they can reap the key rewards.

Eleven years ago, at The Carmel Group’s inaugural Five Burning Questions conference in southern CA, an anonymous attendee stated a “law” that has since proved itself repeatedly: If you do not attend certain conferences regularly (even if you read the trades and talk regularly to peers), you will remain at least six months behind the latest industry developments.