By all accounts, John Baker, a 44-year-old venture capitalist, is a pretty smart guy. So more than a few of his New York friends took notice when he threw down close to $1,000 for a new satellite TV system a couple of months ago. They, too, were attracted by the decidedly late-20th-century look of RCA’s Digital Satellite System, or DSS: sleek and ergonomic, from its shallow, punch-bowl-size dish-antenna to its slim-lined receiver-decoder, which comes in aviator gray or black. The Trekkie tricorder-shaped remote controller didn’t hurt its baby-boomer appeal, either. But what really sold Baker, his friends and, apparently, hundreds of thousands of others is what DSS delivers: loads more television programming than cable – in sharp, dazzling digital perfection. Well, pretty darn close to laserdisc-quality pictures and compact-disc-clear sound. Compared with the big, bulky satellite dishes that make homes look like missile sites, DDS is cheaper to buy, and much easier to install. In less than an hour after he got his system to his Long Island home, Baker’s wide-screen TV was awash in offerings, like a TV Guide run amok. “It’s great; I must have 40 different movies,” he says. “It beats the video store.” And it is so simple to use, Baker says, that his 8-year-old son navigates its “point and select” choices with a technophile’s unfettered ease. One of Baker’s cousins, who recently put the small dish on the terrace of her 24th-story apartment in downtown Manhattan, raves: “It is wonderful and everybody who sees it thinks it’s really cool.”
But do they see the bills? Unlike the big dishes, DSS can’t scan for signals, any TV signals, and pull them down into your home – sometimes for free. Instead, DSS owners may choose only from two providers, DirecTV, a unit of GM Hughes Electronics, or United States Satellite Broadcasting, a subsidiary of Hubbard Broadcasting. Their programming of up to 175 channels, including pay-per-view features, special sports packages and old cable standbys like MTV and HBO, can run as much as $75 a month. Thomson Consumer Electronics, manufacturers for RCA and GE, builds the home unit, which gets its signals beamed directly from great, winged bundles of transponders parked somewhere above Texas, 22,300 miles in space. The basic DSS unit cost $699, and the deluxe version (which can send a signal to two television sets) is $899. Installation is an additional $70 to $200. This overall priciness is one factor that has some people – probably those who remember eight-track, Betamax and 8080 computer chips – questioning whether digital satellite TV is a true fast-forward or just a transitional technology. Thomson, USSB and DirecTV are betting more than $1 billion that it is the former.
Though DSS is cable-free, it does not necessarily free users from the cable. Local network affiliates are not carried on the dish, so some customers keep basic cable service – and another monthly bill – to receive them. “It’s basically another cable system,” says Cliff Prewett, general partner for Satellite Texas, a satellite-dish distributor in Dallas. So far, many DSS customers live in suburban or rural areas that are not served by cable. James Harper, a spokesman for Thomson, says there are 10 million to 20 million homes that have no access to cable and an additional 20 million to 25 million more not cable-linked – all DSS prime targets. But DSS profits will really soar, and cable companies will lose big, if the dish catches on in densely populated, cable-served areas. As a result, some cable companies have invested in their own satellite television system, called PrimeStar. It carries 77 channels and has about 100,000 subscribers. Other cable executives have begun to publicly question digital’s supposed picture superiority over their own humble analog offerings, and to point out what they see as dish drawbacks. TV junkies, with no economic ax to grind, complain that since the dish must have a clear line of sight to the south to fix on its satellites, many urban apartment dwellers are excluded. And there are the pesky rain outages: some DSS owners have said that major thunderstorms interrupt satellite pictures.
But in places like Indianapolis, where Thomson is cranking out 100,000 DSS units a month, it looks like digital satellite TV could give cable a run for its subscribers’ money, soon becoming almost as commonplace as the VCR. Jimmy Schaeffler, an independent media consultant with Paul Kagan Associates in Carmel, Calif., estimates that 10 million to 15 million cable and rural viewers will switch to digital television. The break-even point for USSB is 2 million subscribers.mm Since DSS first went on limited sale in June of last year, more than 300,000 systems have been sold and switched on, says Steve Blum, manager of consumer marketing for USSB. By comparison, in 1977, when VCRs were first widely available, 209,000 of them were taken home. And for John Baker, at least, it’s been a very happy cohabitation. Even in the worst weather, he says, the reception is still worth the combined $60 a month he pays for DSS programs and basic cable. For him, it comes down to one question: “Did you ever see the kind of stuff I was getting on my cable?”
PHOTOS: Hot digital does it: TV programs are compressed into digital form at ground stations, and beamed to satellites. The signals are then transmitted to households with DSS dishes (right). A tuner-decoder unscrambles them for viewing.
Subject Terms: DIRECT broadcast satellite television – United States
