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Technology Stocks : Loral Space & Communications -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Geoff who wrote (4758)	10/22/1998 12:21:00 PM
From: Rocket Scientist	Respond to of 10852

Interesting little blurb in the EWSJ today to effect that Cyberstar will tomorrow be distributing a feature length film to a half dozen movie houses--movie studios said to see this as a potentially important means of distribution to dramatically reduce shipping delays and costs associated with physically moving reels of film. Apparently the tomorrow's electronic distribution by C* will be a first. C* seems to be a great thing for customers, but as a LOR investor, I have a few concerns: 1. To reduce start-up investment C* is leasing space from Skynet; that was probably the right decision, but let's remember that to the extent Skynet is leasing space to C, it's losing opportunity to lease to others. Also, launch of dedicated C spacecraft seems to be in the indefinite future (not earlier than two years from now); so what capacity and revenue growth constraints does that imply? 2. It's not clear to me what entry barriers exist to slow C*'s competitors; in Loral's other businesses, generally, there are regulatory and 3. This will be the first time Loral is going after an essentially retail market place with all that implies in terms of customer service, installations and maintenance etc for what could be 100K's of users. Does it have the knowhow and infrastructure to deal with that kind of customer base?

To: Geoff who wrote (4758)	10/22/1998 2:19:00 PM
From: Sawtooth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10852

A kinda' interesting FWIW item: I just returned (as in an hour ago) from a pretty decent emerging technologies "symposium". One of the presenters moved, slide by slide, through a hierarchy of ascendant technologies, mostly network design and components. After he got to the stuff at the bleeding edge today, he said, "Now I'm going to give you a glimpse of the future. I'm going to show you the infrastructure that's being built today for the internet of tomorrow; the communications systems of tomorrow." He clicked up a slide with the Teledesic and the Globalstar logos on it. He talked a little about the design and LEO's in general, but it was pretty clear that most of the audience had likely never hear of either project and it was pretty new stuff to the presenter, too. Sure made me feel good, though. Owning a little bit of the infrastructure of the future. ; ) FWIW.