SkyBOX: A C-Band Saga
Here's a story about a once-great business, the inexorable march of technology and the arrogance ... to say nothing of the destructive power ... of monopolies.
The first hints of serious disease trickled into my mailbox early last week. We hear, they said, that the C-Band business is going out of business .... We hear that Motorola will kill it by ceasing to support of C-Band authorizations.
Now Motorola is, of course, the ONLY support for C-Band authorizations. It wound up with that monopoly via its take over of General Instruments, the former "VideoCypher" C-Band monopoly, in 1999. It has profited handsomely from the C-Band business which, at its pre-Motorola peak, numbered nearly 2.4 million subscribers.
But, as in many things Motorola, the company has given this business only token support, being content to milk the revenue stream from far flung subscribers as the newer little dish services soaked up subscribers in more urban/suburban settings. Today the big dish has fewer than 23,000 subscribers ... but the revenues still come in. Would Motorola cut that off?
I called Motorola PR honcho Jennifer Erickson. I left a message. I wrote an email. I got no response so I called a few more times and ... bingo! ... Ms. Erickson answered her phone. I made my query and she said, in essence, "What's C-Band?" She said she would check the rumors out. She said she would call me back.
That call never came. So I tried Mike Mountford at NPS. And he gave me the scoop: Yes, Motorola is likely to discontinue its support of C-Band authorizations at the end of this year. There's a glimmer of hope, but Mountford's NPS has stopped selling annual subscriptions.
So I wrote a story on that (along the way completely mangling the spelling of Mr. Mountford's last name ... urgh! my apologies.) And I got a lot of response to that story. And guess what? Some of that response came from programmers who had been planning new C-Band feeds. Some of it came from folks who service C-Band equipment. One message admonished me to tell "both sides of the story." (And if the author of that email would tell me what this story is missing, I most certainly will.) But none of it ... nothing ... nada ... came from Motorola.
So we're talking about people's lives, and business plans, and 22,606 households who just love those big dishes. But we're also talking about Motorola which is, apparently, too big to be bothered.•
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