Cable Passes Satellite as Leading Digital Pay-TV Platform During 2008
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Here's the score at the end of 2008, in terms of paying digital subscribers:
Cable - 130 million
DTH - 119 million
In Robert Klein's list, rolling out new services is one of the marketing goals of cable system operators.
The economics of rolling out new services becomes practical when those new services can be monetized. Honestly, on an analogue cable system, the best you can do is to offer all channels and trap some of them to offer lower priced (read: lower value) packages. No bouquet bundling of channels. No internet. No data. No telephony. No VOD.
What is sad, in spite of advances in cable television services, most systems here at home have remained analogue. Much worse, with the dawning of digital terrestrial television, local cable operators are fostering this fear that DTT will make cable obsolete, thus upgrading will be a losing gamble. That is simply preposterous, or at least ignorant: DTT has smaller coverage than analogue, making cable systems more important for provincial areas.
The problem, really, is that cable operators have not planned for growth in the magnitude that would allow them to build capacities and, therefore, revenues.
Reality check: Huge growth requires huge resources. If cable systems remain small and isolated, MSOs will simply crawl into their areas and buy them out or crush them. As the IMS Research is seeing in China and the other developing countries, protectionist "brakes" will not stop technological determinist "accelerators".
The key is consolidation, if small cable operators wish to survive.
And if these troubles
Should vanish like rain on midday,
Well I've no doubt there'll be more.
And we can't run and we can't cheat,
'Cause babe when we meet
What we're afraid of,
We find out what we're made of.
-Everything But The Girl
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