| reply to en102
Re: Rural subs getting the shaft (again) by AT&T? I was also thinking about Satcos.
Like you, it doesn't make sense for either AT&T or Verizon to buy either DTV or ETV. Partnerships with either will work just fine in the meantime for areas without TelcoTV.
It does make sense to me that DTV and ETV merge to better compete against cable. They tried before, but the government rejected it outright and would challenge it in court, so they dropped the bid. It seemed very foolish and short sided to me, especially considering they haven't seen a telco merger they didn't like.
If it went through, it would have had over 20 million subscribers, or about 90% of sat TV market, but only 20% of overall pay TV market.
The latter isn't much too much of a concern, Comcast is almost at 30%, and rules can be created to mitigate the effect (i.e. reasonable carriage, etc.) if it is a problem.
The former is trickier, if sat was the only option available to you, you'd only have one real option left. But, I think merger conditions could handle this as well. Basically they could be prohibited from engaging in price/promo discrimination based on where you get service. It would cost more to hook up more rural customers, but they'd get the same pricing as urban/suburban customers. There could be minimum customer service requirements for rural areas, and other various conditions to protect those customers.
Basically it would create more competition between cablecos and satcos; by letting the satcos increase scale, reduce redundancies, and focus on competing with cable and not with each other, without hurting sat customers who have no other choices. Deploying 2 separate satellite network systems to serve the same market is ridiculously expensive and dumb. |
