DBS Reacts to Disaster
By Monica Hogan -- Multichannel News, 9/12/2001 1:10:00 PM
Like others around the country, the satellite industry was caught off guard by the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., Tuesday.
The Satellite Broadcasting & Communications Association canceled the fall SkyFORUM conference that had been scheduled for Friday in Manhattan.
'We at the SBCA express our deepest sympathies to the families and friends of the victims,' the association said in a brief statement issued late Tuesday. 'Our thoughts and prayers go out to them.'
As of Wednesday, the SBCA had no immediate plans to reschedule SkyFORUM, and it was still working through contractual obligations related to the event.
From the rooftop of their offices in Alexandria, Va., SBCA workers could see the Pentagon as it burned Tuesday. 'You could smell it from here,' SBCA spokesman James Ashurst said.
DirecTV Inc. closed its offices in El Segundo, Calif., Tuesday morning as a precautionary measure because of its close proximity to Los Angeles International Airport, DirecTV spokesman Bob Marsocci said.
Direct-broadcast satellite customers at least temporarily lost local broadcast and East Coast network feeds from New York stations that had transmitted their signals to DirecTV or EchoStar Communications Corp. via uplink stations at the World Trade Center. In one instance, a station was broadcasting the imminent collapse of one of the towers, and the signal was lost at the moment the building fell.
Most of the broadcast signals were restored via satellite once the stations switched to uplink feeds from the Empire State Building.
EchoStar fielded requests Tuesday from several government law-enforcement agencies across the country that wanted to have DBS systems installed in new or temporary facilities following the attacks so that they could keep in touch with the unfolding events. EchoStar spokesman Marc Lumpkin said the company worked with local retailers to make sure the satellite dishes and receivers were installed quickly.
'We're ready to handle more requests,' he added Wednesday.
Satellite-radio start-up XM Satellite Radio Inc. announced Tuesday that it had postponed its commercial-service launch and related launch events previously slated to take place Wednesday. The company's headquarters are based in Washington, D.C.
'The thoughts and prayers of all XM employees go out to those affected by these horrible events,' XM president Hugh Panero said in a statement.
The Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing typically purchases disaster insurance when it plans any big conference, senior vice president of marketing Seth Morrison said. Still, there's no way to plan ahead for some forms of disruption.
Morrison said there was no way to replicate the planning meetings that CTAM had expected to hold with various cable-industry leaders, who tend to congregate only for big events such as the Walter Kaitz Foundation Fund-Raising Dinner. Much of the planning -- including an intended meeting on next summer's CTAM Summit -- will now have to be held less formally, through long-distance conference calls.
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