Gekko

IF you’ve been locked up in a basement for the past several months, then you might not be aware that there are several companies desperately trying to sell you a home receiver for satellite television. The idea is that you can get more channels at a lower cost than you can with your cable system, though you still need either cable or a conventional antenna for the local stations. A brutal price war has driven down the cost of getting direct broadcast satellite (DBS) TV to $200 or less, from $700 just a few months ago.

There are three major competitors in the business. Hughes DirecTV and US Satellite Broadcasting have a joint venture to broadcast complementary channels from the same satellites. Hughes is owned by GM shareholders, USSB is backed by Hubbard Broadcasting and George Soros. Number Three is PrimeStar, which is owned by a group of cable companies, and whose subscribers need big (36 inch) dishes. Ted Turner, now a mild-mannered corporate bureaucrat at Time Warner, has been quoted as saying that PrimeStar “isn’t a real business,” presumably because technology has passed it by.

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IF you’ve been locked up in a basement for the past several months, then you might not be aware that there are several companies desperately trying to sell you a home receiver for satellite television. The idea is that you can get more channels at a lower cost than you can with your cable system, though you still need either cable or a conventional antenna for the local stations. A brutal price war has driven down the cost of getting direct broadcast satellite (DBS) TV to $200 or less, from $700 just a few months ago.

There are three major competitors in the business. Hughes DirecTV and US Satellite Broadcasting have a joint venture to broadcast complementary channels from the same satellites. Hughes is owned by GM shareholders, USSB is backed by Hubbard Broadcasting and George Soros. Number Three is PrimeStar, which is owned by a group of cable companies, and whose subscribers need big (36 inch) dishes. Ted Turner, now a mild-mannered corporate bureaucrat at Time Warner, has been quoted as saying that PrimeStar “isn’t a real business,” presumably because technology has passed it by.