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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E. Davies who wrote (19352)	1/31/2000 10:24:00 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

OK....I'll bite B2B Auction.............I'll buy that Comedy....................we could use a few laughs Security...................I know I need it Blind Date...............have I got a friend for you Foto Finishing..........You've got......pictures

To: E. Davies who wrote (19352)	1/31/2000 11:28:00 PM
From: Susan Saline	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

what does athm have in common with wireless? am curious about what my salespeson was talking about

To: E. Davies who wrote (19352)	2/1/2000 8:49:00 AM
From: Solid	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Hi Eric, More Cheery news. Not. Its stories like these that squash the wind out of the stories you posted reference to. AOL is one bad ass mf'er with dirty politics and they are pushing to the 'hilt' right now on TV and with those frisbee disks 5.0. cabledatacomnews.com Cable Datacom News Perspectives Excite@Home's AOL Challenge With the most installed broadband access customers and 72 million cable homes under exclusive service contracts, Excite@Home execs are bullish on the company's prospects. When the specter of AOL Time Warner is mentioned, Excite@Home CEO George Bell and his colleagues point to Excite@Home's commanding lead over Road Runner in the cable modem market as a recipe for long-term success. "Despite the fact that Road Runner and @Home launched at approximately the same time, today we have twice as many broadband subs as Road Runner. We are three times their size in our North American footprint and nearly four times their size worldwide," said Bell on a January call with Wall Street analysts. "During the next year as Time Warner and AOL work with regulators and others to get their merger approved, we will do what we've been doing all along, quarter by quarter, since the beginning: growing subscribers, service levels, and customer satisfaction." While Excite@Home is indeed larger than Road Runner, the analogy is a red herring. With more than 22 million subscribers and the most trafficked sites on the Internet, America Online is an exponentially more powerful competitor than Road Runner alone. And when Time Warner is added to the mix, the combination is potentially lethal. Consider this. America Online has 20 times more paying Internet access subscribers than Excite@Home. In the fourth quarter alone, AOL added more customers, 1.8 million, than Excite@Home has in over three years. Each of these AOL customers is a ripe target for a broadband upgrade. Excite@Home points to its Web portal properties as a key competitive advantage and their top source of qualified cable modem subscriber leads. In December, according to Media Metrix, Excite@Home's Web services counted 27.6 million unique visitors. Not bad, except AOL and Time Warner Internet services together attracted over 60 million, providing even more acquisition ammunition. It's true that Excite@Home will have the opportunity to land some 10 million cable modem customers by the end 2003, when its cable partners begin offering access to other ISPs, including AOL. Of course, by that time, AOL will add just as many dial-up subscribers, pushing its total past 30 million, and attract a few million cable modem customers of its own on Time Warner Cable systems. At that point, once open access occurs, AOL Time Warner will be positioned to unleash a marketing tsunami, the likes of which Excite@Home has never seen. Excite@Home counters that its 72 million home cable footprint provides an advantage against AOL, except that more than half the total will be through non-exclusive arrangements within three years. And guess what new competitor has a cable affiliate footprint of more than 75 million homes today? Time Warner, of course, with its stable of cable programming networks that include CNN, TNT and TBS. It is not unforeseeable that Time Warner will offer licensing discounts on these networks to MSOs that also agree to carry AOL services, a deal that will likely be too good to refuse. While Excite@Home boasts about its broadband content prowess, the company offers very little to consumers today and it has been slow to improve the situation. When the company launches its new Excite-branded broadband portal in March it will debut six months behind schedule. Facing AOL Time Warner, they will be squaring off against the world's largest media and Internet company. This is not to say that Excite@Home will drown in the AOL Time Warner tidal wave. Excite@Home is clearly an elite Internet player and will continue to be. But, in a few years, the big dog in broadband could end up the underdog. Better get cracking George. The clock is ticking.