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Technology Stocks : IATV-ACTV Digital Convergence Software-HyperTV -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Hausser who wrote (7505)	11/4/1999 6:39:00 AM
From: Steve Hausser	Respond to of 13157

LIMITLESS POTENTIAL...Our integration into HITS and our pact with Viewer's Choice will be a HUGE business HITS Sports Tier Has Limitless Potential By R. THOMAS UMSTEAD March 8, 1999 Tele-Communications Inc.'s recently announced sports pay-per-view tier may not quite measure up to DirecTV Inc.'s PPV-sports offerings, but it's a start. The new, eight-channel Headend in the Sky platform is the closest thing that the industry has to matching the very popular and attractive direct-broadcast satellite multichannel lineup of National Basketball Association, National Football League, Major League Baseball and National Hockey League out-of-market games. The HITS tier will offer ESPN's college football, college basketball and Major League Soccer PPV packages, as well as a sports barker channel to tell subscribers what's coming on each channel and how much it costs. The barker will also keep information-hungry sports fans up-to-date with a feed directly from ESPN's online site. Of course, TCI and other cable operators are hoping that the tier will eventually entice the professional leagues to distribute their games to cable. With the multichannel-digital-PPV sports tier, the leagues' argument that cable lacks a uniform PPV platform with enough channels to offer as many as eight games per day is now rendered mute. Also, with only 1.5 million subscribers currently deploying HITS, the tier has fewer subscribers than DirecTV, and it poses little threat to national and local broadcast-network ratings. But the tier's greatest revenue and competitive potential may not lie in its ability to challenge DBS for professional-league packages. Rather, its ability to offer exclusive and unique sports programming may prove to be the tier's most attractive calling card for operators. The tier will feature a stand-alone PPV channel, on which ESPN will initially offer live international events, as well as archival programming, on a PPV basis. A European soccer tournament or the X Games' greatest hits will undoubtedly draw decent buy-rates. But the greater opportunity may be to find new and innovative PPV-sports programming that could be exclusive to HITS. There's no reason why ESPN -- or an outside PPV-event distributor -- couldn't access those channels to create and build sports events that would define digital PPV, much like the pro league out-of-market packages have helped to characterize DirecTV. ESPN, for example, could offer its X Games on a TripleCast-like basis, with three or four channels covering each event live and in its entirety to complement the network's basic-cable coverage. Or Showtime and TVKO could generate additional PPV revenues for their boxing shows by offering next-day PPV replays of big Oscar De La Hoya or Evander Holyfield fights, complete with different camera angles so that viewers can choose which angle to view the big knockout punch from. The revenue and image potential for PPV sports is limitless if the industry is willing to take a few risks and experiment with different ideas. DirecTV took full advantage of its channel capacity to build awareness for its PPV business, which helped to sell dishes. Now it's cable's time to make the best of its newfound PPV and sports opportunities and to get digital boxes into the home. multichannel.com Compliments of Croatty2 RB