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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stoctrash who wrote (25031)	11/10/1997 4:16:00 PM
From: BillyG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

This time of year the only flights from Toronto to the Caymans are one-way. Wanna go?

To: Stoctrash who wrote (25031)	11/10/1997 5:43:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

Adelphia is only using DCT-1000 boxes until the next generation is available...................................... mediacentral.com Adelphia Slates 'Shallow' Launch Of Digital Service By Jim Barthold Adelphia Communications Corp. last week launched a tier of digital services in 25 of its 50 cable systems that pass about 1.2 million of its 1.7 million subscribers. The nation's seventh-largest MSO is aiming the service at multi-pay households in an effort to combat DBS competition. "Our intent is to launch on a fairly broad scale, but not a deep scale," said Michael Rigas, Adelphia's senior VP-operations. "We want to get enough boxes out there to satisfy customers who might be inclined to go to DSS to search for more movies. "We don't want to get a lot of boxes out there, because we want to wait for the next generation, which obviously would be able to do a lot more of the things that we feel need to be done in the long run." For $9.95 on top of their basic monthly subscription fee, Adelphia subscribers can get a NextLevel Systems Inc. DCT-1000 digital box; an 18-channel pay-per-view package supplied by Tele-Communications Inc.'s Headend-In-The-Sky (HITS) service; the Prevue interactive program guide; and 40 channels of Music Choice digital audio. Depending on which service they choose, pay network subscribers can get eight channels of HBO; four channels of Cinemax; three channels of Showtime; two channels of The Movie Channel; or all of those multiplexes as part of the $9.95 fee. Adelphia is investing $60,000 to $70,000 per headend to install a NextLevel "six-pack," according to Dan Liberatore, the company's engineering VP. The package includes three racks of equipment to download programming from six transponders; integrated receiver transcoders (IRTs); QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) upconverters; and control equipment. The NextLevel digital boxes are one-way units with a telephone return for ordering pay-per-view services, Liberatore noted. Keeping the launch shallow across a wide area will give Adelphia a migratory path toward aiming next-generation interactive services at more subscribers, according to Rigas. "We wanted to get started with more movies because that's the big reason for people to go to DSS," he said, emphasizing that the NextLevel technology is only an introductory step. He continued: "What we're launching is what's available now. It's the first step in a larger transition to an advanced platform that will be available in the first half of next year and that will be an open platform" via CableLabs' OpenCable initiative. Rigas said Adelphia also will continue its aggressive rebuild-upgrade schedule. "We intend to rebuild, upgrade all our systems" to two-way, he said. "This buys us some time." He also noted that Adelphia systems will offer the service quietly. "We're not going to market as extensively as we would otherwise, if we wanted to drive a lot of boxes deep into the system," Rigas said. "We're doing some direct-mail pieces, we're doing some billstuffers. We're not going to go heavy into the telemarketing until the next generation of boxes comes out." Adelphia has no short-term plans to offer so-called "bundled" prices to subscribers who may be high-speed data or telephone customers, Rigas said. However, he added that "it's something we would consider down the road." On another front, the next-generation boxes will let Adelphia tap the interactive TV market, according to James Rigas, the MSO's planning VP. "Our belief is that one of our main advantages in the long term is having an interactive platform in the house," he said. "But in the short term, we want to have a digital product out there to meet the short-term marketing challenges we have. "Everything we're doing is geared to get the product out there, meet the short-term needs, make sure we do it in a way that's compatible and allows us to evolve smoothly to the real end, which is a digital interactive box and the OpenCable standard." James Rigas added that the marketing strategy for the new offerings would be dictated by the direction Adelphia will take in migrating from analog to digital. "I think we can pretty much drive volume according to what marketing package we use and how aggressive we want to be with that," he said. (November 10, 1997)