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Technology Stocks : Concurrent Computer (CCUR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Keoki Koga who wrote (5166)	9/27/1998 7:15:00 PM
From: Don Hand	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21143

Holy Grail The Atlanta Journal and Constitution had a four page spread Sunday called The Future of Telecommunications. Most of the stories centered around the merger of Baby Bells and Cable companies and their services as it related to the 1996 Tele. Bill. One article focused on Scientific Atlanta. Scientific Atlanta confident its Explorer system will appeal to burgeoning digital services market. Paving the info highway: Technology firm sees digital television and video on demand as future favorites. By Charles Haddad staff writer. In the race to rewire the country for the information highway, Scientific-Atlanta and its communications hardware hold a commanding lead. But is it a race worth winning? "It doesn't matter how good Scientific-Atlanta's technology is - and it may be the best," says George Hunt, a technology analyst with Interstate/Johnson Lane. "What matters is whether the cable industry deploys this digital technology and people use it." So far, it's too early to gauge the potential appeal. Only 15 percent of the country's cable systems have been upgraded to handle such new digital services as high-speed access to the Internet, telephone service, video on demand and digital television. These are the things enabled by Scientific-Atlanta's new Explorer system and hardware. Nonetheless, Scientific-Atlanta is optimistic these services - and thus its new systems - will catch on. The company's own marketing research has found about 20 percent of a system's subscribers take digital services within the first two to three months in which they're offered. "It's never over until it's over but we're increasingly confident," says Bob Van Orden, Scientific-Atlanta's vice president of products. What Scientific-Atlanta is selling is a new series of products called the Explorer 2000 system. It includes a set-top box, server and network. The system is capable of sending and receiving digital signals. Those signals can include video, voice and data. "Our strategy for the Explorer is to deliver the broadest array of services that we can anticipate," says Steve Necessary, Scientific-Atlanta's vice president for marketing. "That means providing not only cable TV but video on demand, e-mail and all the other digital services." The pitch is starting to work well with cable operators. Fifteen have bought the Explorer system. They have announced plans to deploy it in 52 markets, serving 12 million subscribers. These figures represent about 17 percent of the country's 68 million cable TV subscribers. But that number does not represent how many subscribers have been offered digital services and are actually using them. Those figures are small nationwide. "Video on demand has always been seen within the industry as the Holy Grail," says Van Orden. "We've seen evidence that the Holy Grail is upon us."