Opinion Time

Ok so still nothing really interesting to talk about in the satellite industry so its time for some commentary from yours truly.

Thoughts on Comcast and NBC Universal…

I was working at the fair for my friend when I got word that COMCAST was thinking about buying into NBC Universal. When I heard the news it kind of shocked me and the more I thought about it to more I thought that if COMCAST did get control of NBC Universal that it wouldn’t just be bad for satellite providers but bad for all multichannel operators.

With the entire DirecTV and Versus fight as of late shows how bad things can get, now imagine if COMCAST controlled all the NBC Universal properties. If that were to happen then perhaps all cable and satellite companies should just change their name to COMCAST as they wont be able to survive without working with COMCAST. To me that’s a bad thing.

And speaking of DirecTV and the Versus fight, I got to admit for this one I am taking COMCASTS side in this battle.

It seems like the bad guy here is DirecTV who wants to move VERSUS to their Sports Tier. The movement of the channel to the sports tier will not only force DirecTV customers to pay more for a channel they were getting for free in their package, but also would remove millions of eyeballs from VERSUS who would in turn be losing millions of dollars in ad revenue.

VERSUS has gone on record and stated that they do want a single price increase with DirecTV, they just want to be left in the programming package they are in now.

That sounds fair to me.

And while VERSUS has been very vocal publicly about this mess DirecTV hasn’t really said anything about it other then that VERSUS wants a rate increase.

I know every story has two sides, but this one smells fishy from DirecTV. As much as I support the satellite industry here I am clearly in VERSUS corner on this one…

Better Marketing?

Yeah if you have been reading “The Satellite Dish” for a long time you will see that I have been ragging on Dish Network and it’s marketing department.

It appears that the folks at Dish have been paying attention and have started using some of my points in some of their new advertising.

While DirecTV has always had the better sports programming for the past few years the Dish Network equipment (made by Echostar) has blown away the equipment used by DirecTV.

I have heard a few ads comparing their technology against DirecTV’s technology, and all that I can say is, it’s about damn time!

While it is only my opinion I can say that the Dish Network DVR’s blow away the DirecTV DVR’s. The Dish Network receivers are faster, the menus look better, they are easier to use and provide a much better experience.

The Dish Network marketing team not only nails it when it comes to compairing the equipment but also for the first time really shows off their Dish Remote Access applications which lets customers no only program DVR timers from anywhere (including their cell phons) but also manage recording and timers on their DVR’s but also the ability to watch recordings from their DVR’s with the proper Sling enabled equipment.

It is my opinion that the Dish Remote Access blows away the DirecTV Remote Scheduling apps, which only let you program a timer from remote. It is about time that Dish starts to promote this amazing feature.

And while the Dish ads are no were as good as DirecTV in terms of production value and star power I think its great that Dish is starting to finally promote all the great technologies they offer that DirecTV does not.

I am looking forward to seeing where this campaign goes in the future.

You can see some of this new campaign at http://www.dishnetwork.com/compare/technology.aspx