900,000 subscriptions
- Thread starter softwiz
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cidbozek said:
That's my point... Don't get me wrong, I love Voom but they cannot keep bleeding millions for years and years.
Somethings got to give one way or another...
I think the DVR and whole house system will be a big hitter. Others disagree.
softwiz said:
Conservative guess; the whole house DVR with clients costs Rainbow/Voom $800 per sub(1 home base, 2 clients).
So you either have to charge customers a pretty penny for that hardware or you have to go further into the red by subsidizing a rollout.
Which option do you suggest makes it a "big hitter"? And for whom?
BTW, based on reported DirecTV numbers, only 5% of their HD customers bought the HDTivo units. How many Voomers do you figure will buy the hardware if it's priced at $1k?
- Nov 29, 2003
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cfarm said:
Yep, but that is still 25,000 subs were willing to pay $1000.00 for it, that should show how importent the HD-DVR will be for Voom if they have a good lease rate for it.
What lease rate do you propose so that we can quickly do the math for how long it takes to recoup?bruce said:
No matter how you slice it, the DVR rollout is a prickly issue. Tough given the current financials to justify a subsidized box. Deeming it "important" or "popular" doesn't pay the bills.
IMO the cable cos have set the bar with their aggressive DVR rollouts in the last year. They came loaded for bear. Companies like Comcast and Time Warner come with deep pockets. That's who Voom is marketing against. You can say it's DirecTV or Echostar and you're only battling over 18% of the US TV viewing audience. Cable still owns the lion's share of 70+%.
When a Comcast dual tuner HD DVR costs me only $5/mo additional on my cable bill, it's a hard sell to say, "Hey, we've got this $1,000 solution over here". Great, it's a whole house deal. I can rent 2 or 3 Comcast boxes and it's no secret that all the serious players are looking at whole house solutions. Voom has no exclusive on that technology.
Let's hope they can at least get it to market in a reasonable amount of time to be considered in the game. Wait too long and the competition will have theirs out. Time to market is critical and a bunch of time has already been wasted.
softwiz said:
Very bad logic.
900,000 subs to pay off all old debts in a year.
He just has to make more than he puts out.
900,000 is $90M/MONTH, or a billion a year. What makes you think he needs to make $1B a year to break even? They took all sorts of writeoffs to come up with their numbers.
We all agreed that they lost about $75M/quarter
So, rethink your numbers
No way..... plain DVRs are still not that common, though they're increasing dramatically just based on talking to others and reading about them. A whole house system will appeal to a very small group of people too. And if you're reading websites like this one or other "techy" ones, you don't fall into the "normal" group of consumers.softwiz said:
But didnt Directv lose 2.2 BILLION dollars for the first 5 years of service? I think that if the investors and board of directros could actually look long term instead of the next quarter, Voom will be a great success.
In todays NY Daily News or NY Post they stated VOOM has I believe a 3 million subscribers.
http://www.nypost.com/business/42122.htm
http://www.nypost.com/business/42122.htm
cohiba said:
A dual tuner HD DVR costs $400-$450 today. Add networking connectivity and the client boxes to make the "whole house" part go and yes, those guesses for hardware costs are probably not far off.
We're just talking about costs here. What about the engineering challenges? To gain widespread reach with this product, how does one make the network portion work? Remember, it's mostly newer homes that are wired with Cat5 to support a whole house. Many older home network solutions are wireless and there is no wireless standard that will support HD bitrates, not for a couple of years at least!
The reach of a networked DVR will be limited. Many are just crying for it without considering all the implications, not the least of which is how to hook it all up.
philhu said:
Good point, but at some time in the next few years VOOM will need to launch or lease another satellite in order to stay the HD leader. There is always going to be some need for large capital expenses. Looking five years down the road, how many HD channels will VOOM need in order to be the HD leader? and how many satellites will be needed to provide those channels? Also, what is the useful life of these satellites? isn't it only 10 or 15 years?
Another separate point regarding the HD-DVR. At this time, HD DVR sales are definitely driven by the cable companies and the $10 per month lease programs. This affords VOOM an opportunity to get some of these customers as they have no commitment to their current provider. Comcast just released a press release stating that they had installed their one millionth HD-DVR. Once the cable Co's start losing customers a year into the HD-DVR program their $10 lease price will increase or go away (or more likely switch to a centralized HD on demand system).
