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Western Show Wrap - Tech Reality vs. Tech Hype
By FRED DAWSON
Anaheim, Calif. - The cable industry may not yet own the digital future, but developments at last week's Western Show here left no doubt that the gap between tech hype and reality has closed dramatically.
It was easy to overlook the fact that this convention marked a radical departure from recent national events, just because, at the moment of breakthrough, industry leaders had raised the bar in their ambitions to be the gatekeepers of the digital era. The good-news/bad-news disparity was capsulized
in the stance taken by Tele-Communications Inc. chairman and CEO John Malone.
In his much-anticipated luncheon speech last Thursday, Malone chose to focus on a four-year horizon where the end game is a universal cable presence on retail shelves, rather than trumpeting the early successes that his company and others are experiencing as they introduce digital services.
When, after three hours spent pitching that vision to convention goers and the press, Malone was finally asked what the early market response to the current version of digital TV has been, he responded, "Much better than we expected. We're not advertising, but we've got backlogs on orders."
Indeed, the pace of announcements and business on the convention floor made it clear that now that operators are finally offering digital TV, high-speed data and even voice services, it turns out that the
public actually wants these products. For the first time in a long time, vendors selling the hardware and software keys to the full-service gateway were all smiles. |
