Satellite Industry Future Looks Strong Despite Recession, Say Executives
Prospects for the satellite industry remain strong, several satellite executives said Thursday at the SatCon conference in New York. They said the global recession hasn’t hit satellite makers and service providers as hard as other industries. Video programming, particularly in HD, remains a huge growth engine for the industry and shows no sign of slowing, they said.
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Much of the rest of the world lags far behind the U.S. in offering HD programming, leaving a great deal of room for growth, said Bryan McGuirk, SES World Skies’ senior vice president of North American media services. In Africa, Asia, parts of Europe, and the Middle East, HD remains a “novelty,” and the industry can expect considerable growth, he said. Other budding technologies also will help push the business forward. Many content providers are considering getting into 3-D TV, and it isn’t difficult for current satellites to accommodate, McGuirk said.
Not all the speakers agreed that HD in itself spurs growth. Intelsat General Counsel Phil Spector said the company takes a full-service approach to delivering programming instead of relying on the content for growth. “We look at creative solutions for what customer needs,” often using hybrids of technologies to make sure delivery is seamless, Spector said.
Eutelsat has benefited from the growth of video services and HD programming, said Ron Samuel, Eutelsat America’s CEO. The number of HD channels that the company’s satellites carry has doubled in two years and interest in 3-D is growing, he said.
Telesat is growing substantially this year because of increased demand for capacity, largely for video, said CEO Daniel Goldberg. The company expects demand to stay strong, he said. It launched two satellites in the past year and another is moving toward launch. The shift to MPEG-2 from MPEG-4 for greater video compression has been slow because there’s so much infrastructure based on the older technology, Goldberg said. But HD will spread with compression technologies, he said. Must-carry regulations are another reason that video demand continues to grow, he said.
EchoStar and Dish Network continue trying to make video offerings more mobile and compatible with smartphones, but a service is still a couple of years off and it’s unclear what it would look like, said President Dean Olmstead of EchoStar Satellite Services. The company is moving toward introducing Internet-enabled set-top boxes, allowing viewers to interact with each other during a program, he said.
The recent acquisition of WildBlue by ViaSat is good for the satellite broadband industry, said Hughes Communications CEO Pradman Kaul. The market is large enough to support two providers, he said. Kaul said he was expecting ViaSat to join the business by itself. He said the company already has about 200,000 subscribers on its Spaceway 3 satellite.