Audio Video News

EchoStar CEO Charlie Ergen has hyped his company's proposed acquisition of DirecTV as "competition against cable" rather than a "monopoly in the sky." Merger or not, direct broadcast satellite (DBS) services have steadily eroded cable's subscribership, a situation that is beginning to yield benefits for consumers in some parts of the US.

Cable TV may be nearing the end of a long growth season, yielding subscribers to competition from satellite services like DirecTV and EchoStar's Dish Network. Recently published figures from Kagan Research LLC show that the cable industry overall has lost 900,000 subscribers over the past two years.

TV life used to be pretty simple: Stick a pair of rabbit ears on the set, and if you lived near a big city, pull in a dozen channels or so---more if you had a UHF tuner. Now we have cable as well as satellite dishes big and small. In the near future, even your phone company could get into the act with some form of digital subscriber line (DSL) service. But of all these choices, which offers the best value? Two recent studies attempt to unravel the choices facing consumers with an analysis of the options.