Matt Daneman

The video bundle either has long legs or is on its last legs, speakers said Monday at an FCC-hosted workshop on the state of the video market.

Latency issues are potentially a big stumbling block for satellite participation in 5G, speakers said at the Satellite 2016 conference Tuesday in National Harbor, Maryland. Some CEOs said it's a conversation to be avoided; others called it not that big a deal and easily worked around. "Latency is clearly an issue ... we are going to have to deal with," Inmarsat CEO Rupert Pearce said.

Ultra HD needs strict standards and policing of those standards to prevent what happened in the HD market, where non-HD screens were sold as HD, said Antonio Arcidiacono, Eutelsat director-innovation, during an Ultra HD panel Tuesday at the Satellite 2016 conference in National Harbor, Maryland. There already have been signs of such problems, such as sale of 2K Blu-ray discs as 4K, he said. "If you fool the customers, the market will not grow." While Ultra HD lacks a clear definition, traits beyond just higher definition -- from wider color space and higher frame rates to immersive sound -- when put together, "you get the 'wow' factor," said Peter Siebert, executive director of the DVB Project. He said industry specifications have been worked out cooperatively for the high-resolution areas, and now there's work being done on specifications for high dynamic range, high frame rate and related matters. The market is seeing Ultra HD TVs "somewhat in advance of our ability to deliver content to them," said Steve Richeson, Advantech Wireless senior vice president-global sales and business development. He said "4K seems to be customer pull." But the satellite industry is somewhat dropping the Ultra HD ball, with Netflix having launched service in 4K, said Arcidiacono. Satellite providers need to better promote Ultra HD, though the industry has launched some Ultra HD channels, he said.

Video programming increasingly is shuttling from satellite to fiber networks, and eventually hybrid networks that include satellite will be the norm, industry experts said Monday at the Satellite 2016 conference in National Harbor, Maryland. Dropping fiber and data storage prices are leading U.S. broadcasters to cut back from the four video streams they used to put out -- one for each time zone -- while cable companies are getting more of their feeds terrestrially instead of by satellite, all of which is leading to a bigger satellite industry disruption than the digital transition, said Armand Musey, Summit Ridge Group president.

In-flight connectivity company executives threw a number of verbal elbows at one another over data capacity and the future of air-to-ground (ATG) connectivity, at a panel Tuesday at Satellite 2016. "Some of the exaggeration is going to come back and bite some of us," said Leo Mondale, Inmarsat president-aviation. Air passengers want the same kind of connectivity they get on the ground, Mondale said, but "I don't know if there's enough [demand] to float the boat of everyone up here [on the panel]." Mondale and Gogo Chief Technology Officer Anand Chari went back and forth with Don Buchman, ViaSat general manager-commercial mobility, on ViaSat's in-flight broadband offering on JetBlue and United. Chari and Mondale called it "a marketing stunt." "It's not a claim -- just buy a ticket on JetBlue," Buchman said. Chari said that alongside Gogo's efforts on the launch of its 2Ku satellite connectivity service (see 1508240040), it's also working on its next-generation ATG, which includes its interest in the air-to-ground mobile broadband spectrum it asked the FCC to auction (see 1503100047). Financially, ATG becomes viable compared to satellite in-flight connectivity if there is adequate spectrum -- which Gogo doesn't currently have, Chari said. Cost of spectrum "is what swings this thing from reasonable to unreasonable," said David Bruner, Panasonic Aviation vice president-global communications services.

Price increases in the cable industry could be reaching a point where cable distributors' dropping particularly expensive programming -- such as Cable One's and Suddenlink's drops of Viacom in 2014 -- could begin to snowball, said cable experts and insiders. Only smaller distributors have dropped programming thus far, but the next couple of years might see large distributors drop large programmers, BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield said at an American Cable Association's summit Wednesday. ACA members "are looking at these kinds of opportunities really seriously," CEO Matt Polka said separately, but "not everybody within our membership is there yet.”

The Wi-Fi Alliance issued the first of what it says will be several plans for tests to evaluate LTE-unlicensed's impact on a Wi-Fi network. The draft LTE-U test plan follows a Wi-Fi Alliance coexistence test workshop Wednesday in California involving what the group said in a statement was "dozens of industry players" discussing test regimen and agreeing it was "sufficiently mature to begin a validation exercise." Wi-Fi interests in the cable industry have been battling with wireless carriers over whether LTE-U will interfere with Wi-Fi.

Comcast's interest in taking part in the TV incentive auction is more exploratory than with any particular strategy in mind for the bandwidth, CEO Brian Roberts said. In a conference call Wednesday as the company announced Q4 results, Roberts said Comcast's interest is to “see if there's an opportunity to be rewarded with something that has strategic value." The company said in October it would take part in the auction (see 1510270041).

Beyond its planned purchase of Tennis Channel, Sinclair isn't eyeing other cable acquisitions in the immediate future, Chief Financial Officer Chris Ripley said Thursday. "We've looked extensively through the cable network universe to find this acquisition," he said in a conference call on the $350 million acquisition (see 1601270066). "We turned over every rock. We always look at every opportunity [but] we're not on the hunt like we were before this to find an opportunity."

California Public Utilities Commission review of Charter Communications' buying Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable potentially "can be accelerated," TWC CEO Rob Marcus said in a conference call Thursday as the company announced earnings. On regulatory approval of the $89.1 billion pair of deals, Marcus said TWC and Charter are "working constructively with FCC, and DOJ to ensure that they are in a position to approve the deal expeditiously," though he said he couldn't give a timetable for closing. California has said it's on track to make a decision in June on the deals (see 1601130060). Marcus also said TWC is beta testing in New York City an IP video product "that eliminates the need for a leased set-top box." For the year, TWC said it spent $5.82 billion on programming and content, up nearly 10 percent from 2014. Marcus said the cable industry is in the "very early days" of offering content a la carte -- a trend that could shift leverage and lead to slower programing cost growth. When asked about Verizon's small-bundle Custom TV package, Marcus said, "The only reason that we haven't run headlong into a custom TV-type solution is that we've really made a great effort to simplify our offerings as we tried to turn our residential business around, and keeping things simple," with that approach helping in the company's customer numbers -- ending the year up 32,000 video customers.