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

To: art slott who wrote (3654)	5/16/1999 11:40:00 AM
From: JackSkip	Respond to of 13157

This is a big deal for guys like me who live on a mountain, and have to utilize a dish. To date I will be left in the cold on all the cool new services offered by companies like ACTV, and I have been waiting for them to announce deals with “The Dish Network” and/or “Direct TV, but if HITS is going to offer it and GI provides the dish, I'm in!!! I feel like I have a “Get out of Jail free Card”, this is not like Stag, he usually runs and tells within minutes. ******************************************* Broadband Week for May 17, 1999 HITS Moves Ahead on Sky Cable Plans By LINDA MOSS May 17, 1999 Headend in the Sky is moving ahead with plans to launch a direct-to-home satellite service, dubbed "Sky Cable," in late August or September, officials said last week. HITS, a unit of AT&T Corp.'s National Digital Television Center, is still getting signed charter-affiliation agreements back from MSOs and systems that are interested in rolling out Sky Cable, according to Rich Fickle, senior vice president of HITS. The original deadline for those agreements was May 15, but it was pushed back to June 15 due to paperwork delays. At this point, operator response to Sky Cable has been strong enough for Fickle to predict that HITS would have the commitments necessary to launch it. HITS would only go forward with Sky Cable if MSOs and systems committed 300,000 subscribers to it during the next two years, Fickle said. "We're optimistic that we'll get the commitments," he said, adding that HITS is now making plans and targeting a late-summer launch for Sky Cable. Sky Cable is a satellite-overlay service that would permit small systems with 3,000 or fewer subscribers to offer 100 to 150 channels without investing in costly plant or headend upgrades. Homes at those cable systems would continue to get their analog-cable service. But the system would install medium-power dishes from General Instrument Corp. at subscriber homes to receive digital programming from HITS satellite transponders. As a result, Sky Cable subscribers would get program packages that include their old analog lineups overlaid with HITS digital programming, including pay-per-view, premium multiplexes, digital music and an interactive on-screen program guide. The GI dish, as well as a GI hybrid set-top/satellite receiver, would cost operators about $350. Under the expected plan, operators would pay HITS transport fees for the digitized programming, with GI likely to handle signal authorization. Sky Cable still poses some challenges to small cable systems. Their billing systems need to be compatible with HITS, and this entails an investment, sources said. In addition, programmers must agree to have their cable channels delivered via the Sky Cable packages, and all of them haven't signed off yet. More than 1.5 million subscribers -- mainly those of AT&T Broadband & Internet Services, formerly Tele-Communications Inc. -- currently receive HITS digital programming delivered directly by satellite to headend. But that HITS platform is still too costly to make financial sense for very small systems. That's where Sky Cable, which is essentially "HITS to the home," comes in. multichannel.com