Advertisers need more education about the timeline and capabilities of ATSC 3.0, and the consumer experience is especially important, said panelists at the NextGen TV Summit put on by SMPTE and the Society of Broadcast Engineers Thursday,
AT&T had a Q3 net loss of about 1.4 million subscribers across its three pay-TV services -- DirecTV, AT&T U-verse and AT&T Now -- vs. a net loss of about 295,000 subscribers in the year-ago quarter, reported Leichtman Research Group Wednesday. AT&T’s subscriber losses, 79 percent of industry Q3 net losses vs. 30 percent in 3Q 2018, resulted from the company’s decision “to increasingly focus on retaining and acquiring more profitable subscribers,” said LRG principal Bruce Leichtman.
The Department of Agriculture will invest $3.8 million to support broadband deployment in rural Virginia as part of its first round of ReConnect pilot programs, it said Monday (see 1812130064). Recipient Mecklenburg Electric Cooperative will use the funds to deliver fiber to more than 1,250 homes, plus schools and volunteer departments.
Subscribers in more than half the U.S. could use a 5G phone on a 5G network in 2020, said Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg on CNBC Friday. The market will be “different for sure” if T-Mobile buys Sprint and Dish Network launches its own network, he said. “We will not change our strategy." Vestberg predicted T-Mobile/Sprint will probably be completed with “some hurdles left.” The market has been competitive for years, he said. Vestberg said to “get the best out of 5G” requires high-band spectrum. “I think we have the best engineers in the industry both tuning and fixing networks. Other guys really need to do a lot of things to catch up," he said. His team is “executing on our 5G strategy, and we're now up to 15 markets” (see 1910250022) Vestberg said during a call with analysts. The uptake rate is rising for 5G phones and all handsets “coming out next year will be 5G-capable,” he said. Verizon reported profit of $5.3 billion and revenue of $32.9 billion, both beating consensus estimates. Wireline revenue fell 3.8 percent year over year. It reported 193,000 retail postpaid net adds, including 239,000 phones, and retail postpaid churn of 0.79 percent. “Wireline results, while admittedly secondary to wireless, were nothing short of awful,” MoffettNathanson’s Craig Moffett wrote investors: “Verizon’s wireless business is, for the first time in memory, lagging AT&T’s." AT&T, not Verizon, "has the better story to tell about balancing 5G speed AND coverage,” the analyst emailed.
There were 106,680 cable and wireline subscribers out of service in South Carolina Friday morning, said a disaster information reporting system report on areas affected by Hurricane Dorian. That’s nearly double the 53,266 reported for South Carolina Thursday. North Carolina had 40,999 cable and wireline subscribers down, compared to 2,894 Thursday. In Georgia those numbers have improved to just 93 subscribers down from 11,805 Thursday. One broadcast TV station was reported out of service in South Carolina, and five South Carolina radio stations. Georgia had one radio station out of service, but North Carolina had no broadcasters down. The report showed 3.4 percent of cellsites out of service in the affected areas, with 4.6 percent -- a marginal improvement from Thursday -- down in South Carolina, and 3.8 percent down in NC. Thursday’s report showed 0.1 percent of cell sites down in NC. Georgia improved in Friday’s report from 0.3 percent of cell sites down to 0.1 percent. Only a single public safety answering point was reported down in South Carolina. In an order posted Friday, the Wireless Bureau granted the American Radio Relay League’s request for a waiver to permit higher speed data transmissions to allow licensed amateur radio users involved in hurricane relief communications to better aid the relief effort. ARRL was already shipping radio modems to the southeastern U.S. for use in connection with Hurricane Dorian disaster relief, the order said.The FCC deactivated DIRS for Georgia Friday evening.
Despite a slowing global economy and the “looming” U.S.-China trade war, information and communications technology will maintain “steady” sales growth over the next five years, said IDC Thursday. It predicts worldwide ICT spending on hardware, software services and telecom will rise at a 3.8 percent compound annual growth rate, reaching $4.8 trillion in 2023. "Confidence indicators are fluctuating on a monthly basis, depending on short-term indicators ranging from speculation over tariffs and trade wars to political wild cards,” said the researcher. “End-user surveys reflect the impact of this uncertainty on business decision-making, but our forecasts remain roughly stable overall for 2019.”
Pay-TV providers with 93 percent of the market lost 1.5 million net video subscribers in Q2, vs. a net loss of about 420,000 subscribers in the year-ago quarter, reported Leichtman Research Group Monday. Over the past year, top pay-TV providers had a net loss of about 5 million vs. a loss of about 1 million a year earlier, it said. Only Sling TV had subscriber gains in Q2, with 48,000, while DirecTV Now lost 168,000. The top seven cable companies lost about 455,000 video subscribers vs. about 275,000, more than any quarter since Q2 2014, LRG said. Satellite TV services continued to lead all categories with subscriber losses of about 855,000, vs. a net loss of 480,000; DirecTV lost 778,000 for its fifth consecutive quarterly loss, said the researcher. The top phone providers lost about 100,000 video subscribers vs. a loss of about 45,000 subscribers. Top providers reported 86.6 million subscribers: seven cable companies had 46.5 million video subscribers, satellite TV services reported 27.5 million, phone companies 8.8 million and the top publicly reporting vMVPD pay-TV services had 3.8 million, it said.
Gartner expects 5G phones to be 51 percent of total handset sales globally in 2023, it reported Wednesday. Mobile operators began launching such service this year in parts of the U.S., South Korea, Switzerland, Finland and the U.K., “but it will take time for carriers to expand 5G coverage beyond major cities,” it said. Gartner estimates 7 percent of global communications service providers “will have a commercially viable wireless 5G service” by next year: “This will mark significant progress from 5G proofs of concept and commercial network construction work in 2018.” Though 2019's first half saw release of the first fifth-generation smartphones, several OEMs likely will introduce more affordable ones in 2020 in a bid to reverse declining sales, it said. Gartner estimates global smartphone shipments will decline 3.8 percent this year to 1.75 billion units. The researcher projects 5G-capable phones will be 6 percent of total phone sales next year and "as 5G service coverage increases, user experience will improve and prices will decrease.”
Sinclair will buy 21 regional sports networks and Fox College Sports from Disney, which acquired them when it bought most of the assets of 21st Century Fox (see 1901140039), said the companies Friday. The deal has a “total enterprise value” to the RSNs worth $10.6 billion, including the $9.6 billion purchase price, they said. The deal requires DOJ approval, they said. The RSNs changing hands excludes the YES Network, but is “the largest collection of RSNs in the marketplace today, with an extensive footprint that includes exclusive local rights to 42 professional teams” in baseball, basketball and hockey, they said. The RSNs collectively had $3.8 billion revenue and 74 million subscribers in 2018. Sinclair will buy them through a new Diamond Sports Group subsidiary, they said. “While consumer viewing habits have shifted, the tradition of watching live sports and news remains ingrained in our culture,” said Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley. “We are ideally positioned to transfer our skills to deliver and expand our focus on greater premium sports programming.” Antitrust regulators should reject the proposed deal, said America's Communication Association CEO Matt Polka. “Big 4 broadcast network programming and RSN programming are both critical for ACA Connects members,” Polka said. “By jointly negotiating these assets when they serve the same market, Sinclair can raise prices to cable operators for both offerings.”
Uber’s “continued success will come from stellar execution and the strength of the platform we have worked so hard to build,” said CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in an initial-public-offering SEC filing Thursday to raise $1 billion. Uber’s engineering and product teams “are solving some of the most difficult problems at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds,” he said. Uber’s 2018 revenue jumped 42 percent from 2017 to $11.27 billion and was 193 percent higher than 2016's $3.8 billion, said the filing. It had a $3.03 billion operating loss in 2018, 26 percent lower than in 2017, it said. Ex-Facebook executive Matt Cohler, general partner in venture capital firm Benchmark, is Uber's largest individual shareholder with 11 percent of the stock, it said.