Audio Video News

There's a curious three-way war being fought over Direct Broadcast Satellite television. Further court action has been put off until June 12 in the antitrust suit brought by DBSer EchoStar and its parent company Hughes Electronics Corporation against competitor DirecTV. The lawsuit alleges that DirecTV has conspired with retailers to shut EchoStar out of the expanding market for satellite TV. DirecTV has approximately twice the number of subscribers as its smaller rival; in all, there are approximately 40 million DBS subscribers in North America.

Despite the suit, EchoStar has also been in negotiations with DirecTV for a possible merger between the two. EchoStar chairman Charlie Ergen has reportedly attempted to outbid Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, also a suitor for DirecTV. The combination of DirecTV with News Corp.'s Sky Global Networks would result in a global TV operation worth approximately $60 billion. EchoStar's reported partners in the campaign to merge with DirecTV include telecommunications giants SBC Communications and Deutsche Telekom.

EchoStar and DirecTV are both opposing proposals by startup Northpoint Technology that would allow parallel usage of the DBS broadcasting spectrum. Northpoint wants to launch a terrestrial wireless cable service in the 12.2-12.7GHz frequency band, allocated for use by DBSers, claiming that possible interference will be minimized because its transmitters will operate in a "horizontal" polarity, as opposed to satellites' "vertical" polarity. In May, the Federal Communications Commission released the results of interference testing conducted by the MITRE Corporation, concluding that Northpoint's proposed system would cause "significant interference" to DBS operations.

Northpoint has launched an aggressive lobbying campaign in Congress, and a public relations campaign in the press, to spin a more positive image for itself and to win support for its proposed system, which borrows heavily from cellular telephone technology. The DBS industry, which enjoys hugely more favorable subscriber satisfaction than does the cable industry, believes that the Northpoint proposal would do irreparable harm to the quality of its signals. Even with the most stringent corrective measures, residual interference would still be a problem, DBS executives and engineers assert.