Posted on Friday 11 April 2008
DirecTV’s decision to help fund Friday Night Lights in exchange for first dibs on the new episodes is a bold and exciting maneuver for the satellite provider. I’m not entirely certain of how I’ll view this event a year from now, but my knee-jerk reaction is this: one of my favorite shows is getting another season of life and that’s great news. DirecTV with less than 17 million subscribers is available to only about 15% of NBC viewers. As of Q4 2007, I believe Comcast was claiming more than 24 million subscribers between its basic and digital cable services, more subscribers than DirecTV, but not so many more that it should raise red flags around cannibalization. DirecTV has been sued over a similar issue in the past, and DISH has also engaged in such “HD Lite” tactics as well, namely by dropping the overall resolution of its broadcasts to save on bandwidth. In fact, DirecTV actually sued Comcast when Comcast tried to call out DirecTV’s lower-resolution HD in its advertisements.
DirecTV will soon introduce another gizmo called the AM21 that hooks up to the HR21 via USB and provides those missing digital TV receivers. It looks like this is probably how I’ll get this capability back after DirecTV (or its local contract installer) screwed up this part of my upgrade, but since the AM21 isn’t shipping yet, I can’t get DirecTV to tell me for sure whether they’ll be able to send me one.
DirecTV shares were up 42 cents, or 1.6%, to $26.42 in 4pm Nasdaq composite trading. Shares in Liberty Entertainment, the tracking stock through which Liberty holds its DirecTV stake, were up $1.17, or 5.1%, to $24.29 in 4pm Nasdaq composite trading. DirecTV 11 will co-locate with the Spaceway-2 satellite in the vicinity of 99.2 W. During a search for potential launch dates, a check of the Wikipedia Portal: Spaceflight page indicated March 19th, between 22:49 and 23:47 GMT, is a possible window for the Sea Launch Zenit-3SL launch vehicle’s next liftoff attempt. DirecTV-11 will be placed into such an orbit.
