Voom to use 2 Satellites!

Scott Greczkowski

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I am listening to the conference call and Cablevision just announced that soon VOOM will be using 2 Satellites.

Soon VOOM subscribers will get a larger multifeed dish! They said all 8,000+ customers would be getting an upgrade soon!

Thats big news from VOOM!

Did I hear wrong?
 
Scott Greczkowski said:
I am listening to the conference call and Cablevision just announced that soon VOOM will be using 2 Satellites.

Soon VOOM subscribers will get a larger multifeed dish! They said all 8,000+ customers would be getting an upgrade soon!

Thats big news from VOOM!

Did I hear wrong?
you did not hear wrong at all!


here is the trascipt of that part of the call, the question was "does voom have a back up sat"

Are there any plans to have a backup satellite? Thanks.

NEW SPEAKER
The back up satellite right now, we haven't initiated the builder to [inaudible] but as you may have read VOOM we lease capacity on a mid power and F S. S. they call it satellite could as we did the calculations cover for any significant loss on the satellite in orbit. So effectively right now VOOM has two satellites in orbit one of which could serve most of the way, if no not fully and be back up for the first one.


NEW SPEAKER
Will there be additional dishes if that could happen?
NEW SPEAKER
We are looking for dishes that will have dual feeds on them any way. so some of the, what was the number here, 8,000, would have to be swung over a couple of degrees. But at some point starting soon we will be using the bigger dish with both feeds as the standard dish from now going forward
 
more from the call

On VOOM, I think if there are investors who are missing the strategy there, they are probably investors who don't have high-definition television at home. That product continues to become in my estimate more and more important to the consumer. And as more and more product is available, we see the importance in the value being increasing. To give you an example, when you are watching a sports product and you see on the bottom of it that it's available in high-definition television and you are watching it on your high-definition television and you see there are two black bars on either side because you are not getting it in high-definition television, that makes a difference to the consumer. And that dynamic is growing and becoming more and more important as well as, of course, the proliferation of high-definition television sets themselves are growing and that's happening I think rather rapidly. Finally the quality of those sets is going up. The cost of those sets is going down. The, I think it's going to be difficult to be a full service video provider if you have those black bars on the side. When you take a look in the satellite business who's leading that area and who is clearly going to lead that area for a long time is VOOM. I anticipate that they have the potential of being disruptive with their technology, particularly considering that they have not incurred their capital cost at this point whereas the other two satellite providers are, have fully incurred their capital costs and to go and revamp into HDTV is going to be a significant expense to them. And so the economic walk model sort of shifts towards VOOM. And I think if that makes that product have a great deal of promise for the future. I would not discount it by any means.
 
I can't find a link but in the past this was referred to as the backup. I was never sure if it was DBS or FSS---I gues we know now. It is intriguing that they will modify the standard dISH being offered. I had never heard that before. But they don't seem to have made a commitment to upgrade legacy subs.
 
Geronimo said:
But they don't seem to have made a commitment to upgrade legacy subs.

I thinks this is the commitment that you are looking for "so some of the, what was the number here, 8,000, would have to be swung over a couple of degrees."
 
I wonder if this could be a way to better serve west coast customers, who have to point their dish right on the horizon to match up with 61.5.

Also, I wonder how far we would have to swing our dish if its for everyone. If it's as far as 110 or 119, I'm screwed because my apartment balcony faces east.
 
Seanb61 said:
I thinks this is the commitment that you are looking for "so some of the, what was the number here, 8,000, would have to be swung over a couple of degrees."

Lets hope not. I can't imagine going thru the install process again. Think about it... 8000 service calls. What a nightmare.

-John
 
Is having a backup satellite a common practice? Do other satellite providers practice this as well? I'm a noob to satellite and have not done much research on the subject. Is it worth the extra (hundreds?) of millions of dollars to have a redundant system like that? And what is the difference between DBS (direct satellite broadcasts?) and FSS (what does that stand for?)

Also there was mention of dual feeds. Is that a feed per satellite and does it require a special LNB?

Thanks for any information you guys may have.
 
Its very common. In fact it is foolish not to have a backup.

Dish Network has 9 satellites in the sky and leases 2 others from SES Americom:
http://www.dishnetwork.com/content/aboutus/satellites/index.shtml

DirecTV has 7 satellites in the sky

Voom has 1 satellite and now it seems it leases a low powered FSS backup. FSS is a different frequency from DBS. It requires a much bigger dish and a different LNBF to receive the signal.
 
I took that comment about swinging the other 8000 dishes a few degrees to be a statemenyt about what to do if the other satellite was used as a backup (I would think a new LNBF would be needed too).

I did not take it to mean that the current subs get a new dish. But it was pretty vague.
 
rtt2 said:
Its very common. In fact it is foolish not to have a backup.

Dish Network has 9 satellites in the sky and leases 2 others from SES Americom:
http://www.dishnetwork.com/content/aboutus/satellites/index.shtml

DirecTV has 7 satellites in the sky

Voom has 1 satellite and now it seems it leases a low powered FSS backup. FSS is a different frequency from DBS. It requires a much bigger dish and a different LNBF to receive the signal.

Wow, I never knew that there were that many satellites just for dish network. Why did voom make such a big deal about launching Rainbow-1 and we are now only hearing about the backup satellite through a confrence call? Why not have the same fainfare for the new satellite?
 
Dosn't make sense give new subs the new dish BIGGER with new LNB but only swing the 8,000 a drop..how can this work??
 
It sounds like SuperDish is coming to VOOM... They have thier high power DBS satellite and a few degrees away they must be leasing a FSS mid power satellite. I wonder if the satellite will be moved into place, or did they lease and existing one and it will be cleared out for VOOM. A full FSS satellite slot could get them 75+ more HDTV or possibly start LIL somehow (but hard to see without a spot beam satellite).
 
Did they mention any specifics in this conference call in terms of what does it mean for us? New dish? New content? Timetable? Where satellite comes from? How they're going to peplace 8,000 dishes w/o pissing everyone off or losing tons of money?
 
Walter L. said:
Thanks for the post. Very interesting!!! You see things such as "hit by meteoroid", "damaged by solar strorm". Thanks God that we're safe in Earth :D

Note that this list does not include those lost before and during launch. Heard that last year one team borrowed some bolts from another team. They come back from break, reposition the jig, and a multimillion dollar satellite hits the floor. Keep in mind that some science/environmental satellites take up to 7 years to fund, build, and launch. Communications satellites may be only a year or two.
 
If this sat is for more capacity it's unfathomable to me that they don't have the Fox RSNs on Voom (Rainbow Media owns 50% of FSN). If this sat was up there from day 1, why not just use them both from day 1 instead of repointing every sub's dish?

I'm happy if this sat provides extra capacity for Voom, since they don't have much bandwidth as it is, but repointing seems like a very bad way to handle this.

Wow, there's a lot of "ifs" in this post. SPECULATION OUT OF CONTROL! :D
 
rang1995 said:
Dosn't make sense give new subs the new dish BIGGER with new LNB but only swing the 8,000 a drop..how can this work??
The current dish cannot be swung a few degrees without a total loss of signal. I know, I've installed my own 61.5 dish and just retweaked mine this past weekend and got a stonger signal by 10 points and I just barely bumped it. They would have to give us a new setup for this to work.
 
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