NFL Sunday Ticket Continuing Satellite TV Charge into Cable TV's Customer Base at Halfway Point

Satellite sales consistently gaining ground in numbers and holding lead in customer satisfaction.

As we complete the first half of the NFL Season two things become readily apparent. Sports Bars who have bit the bullet and paid for commercial license to show Sunday NFL Football games on several screens are doing booming business.

I, myself being a displaced RAMS Fan have had to frequent such establishments on many occasions to see my team play. Not bad but watching it at home would be more convienient on a Sunday Morning.

NFL Sunday Ticket has been a significant programming differentiator for DirecTV, helping us build a loyal subscriber base," DirecTV chairman Eddy Hartenstein said. "It's crucial for us to have programming that sets us apart from our competition."

His service has more than 17 million customers and is a unit of Hughes Electronics, which is a unit of General Motors Corp. NFL Sunday Ticket allows subscribers to see all out-of-market games each Sunday during the regular season.

At the same time, DirecTV would use new middleware from a News Corp. subsidiary to present a new user interface in subscribers' set-top boxes (STBs) followed by "a suite" of interactive TV services including news, sports, weather, traffic and games.

Additionally, the filing states that the merged operation would launch a new generation of satellites as early as 2006 and no later than 2008 that would provide capacity for local TV coverage in all 210 designated market areas in the United States. It would also enable DirecTV "to transmit more HDTV programming to subscribers, including local channels in HDTV format in select markets."

By 2005, DirecTV said the merged company would offer "very competitively priced set-top boxes with fully integrated digital video recorders, which will result in the deployment of at least 1 million such STBs each year thereafter."

Coincidentally, rival EchoStar at the same time announced it had reached the 1 million DVR mark among DISH Network subscribers.

During his remarks at the retailer rally, Hartenstein said DirecTV would draw on its high customer satisfaction ratings as a key weapon in fending off cable operators who are now ramping up digital cable programs for retail distribution.

He pointed to a recent J.D. Powers and Associates study on cable and satellite that indicated consumer satisfaction is much higher among satellite homes, adding that combined DBS subscriber totals now top 20 million customers