Crash and Burn 2001 Message Board

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Crash and Burn 2001

Public Reply Prvt Reply Mark as Last Read File

Previous 10 Next 10 Previous Next

To: Dale Baker who started this subject	8/9/2001 3:11:55 AM
From: stevenallen	of 207

JuliusM contributed this to Michail's site - just wanted to be sure you saw it... NLI article in tomorrow's Financial Times news.ft.com. Not sure if there's anything really new here, the Telewest merger talks have been reported for several weeks. It's worth doing a search on NTL in the FT archives. I found some interesting statistics on digital TV in the UK (which seems to be NTL's biggest growth business). globalarchive.ft.com. British Sky Broadcasting (Rupert Murdoch's satellite operation) has 5.5M customers, ITV (over-the-air) has around 1.1M, NTL cable has 1.0M, Telewest cable has 0.5M. NTL and Telewest debt combined is about $23B. So that's about $15k per digital TV customer, ohmygawd. Of course NTL has numerous other busineses, principally analog cable TV. But this illustrates that the UK market for TV is brutally competitive and satellite has essentially won at this point. Hence why NTL is a POS, cable TV isn't a viable business if satellite got there first and took 75% of the customers. Further ahead, NTL may be well placed to win a larger share of the UK market for broadband Internet access. Satellites are ill-suited for the Internet, and British Telecom's DSL rollout has apparently been quite inept. But broadband is right now a really tiny consumer business in the UK because of high cost and onerous government regulation. It's about 3-4 years behind the US. So it's pretty doubtful (to me) that the broadband business will mature fast enough to save NTL from collapsing under its debt load.

Report TOU Violation

Share This Post

Public Reply Prvt Reply Mark as Last Read File

Previous 10 Next 10 Previous Next