Orbital Sciences Corporation has started the in-orbit check-out of seven of the eight new ORBCOMM data communications satellites launched recently by the company.
Orbital's Pegasus XL launch vehicle placed the eight 90-pound digital communications satellites into a precise orbit with an altitude of approximately 820 kilometers (510 miles) above the Earth.
Since the launch, the satellite control team located at Dulles, Virginia has made substantial pro-gress in determining the state-of-health and carrying out early per-formance testing of the satellites. While one of the satellites is gen-erating reduced electrical power levels, its effect on overall con-stellation performance is expected to be minimal.
About six hours and 20 minutes after its successful lift-off aboard a Russian Proton rocket, the Asiasat 3 satellite conducted a emergency separation and started spinning out of control after the boosters engine did not re-ignite. The satellite burned up upon re-entry.
AsiaSat 3 was launched Dec 24th from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for China.
This was the third satellite for Asia Satellite Telecommunications Holdings Ltd. (AsiaSat) of Hong Kong.
Asiasat was going to provide telecommunication services to Asia, the Middle East, Australia and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
British Digital Broadcasting won approval from Britain's Independent Television Commission to broadcast digital terrestrial signals next year after agreeing it will shorten the length of a programming supply agreement.
The three licenses cover an initial 12 years and are renewable for another 12 years. BDB is jointly owned by Carlton Communications and Granada Group, which is one of three partners in British Sky Broadcasting.
BDB received its three licenses in June, but was delayed after the losing applicant Digital Television Network complained to the Euro-pean Union Commission about a programming deal between BDB and BSkyB.
Under its license conditions, BDB must limit program supply agreements with all service pro-viders to five years. It must also ensure that BDB isn't stopped from competing with BSkyB, in which Granada owns an 11 percent stake.
Sky Latin America officially launched in Colombia, the third country the service has entered since its launch in Mexico and Brazil in late 1996.
The service backed by News Corp., TCI International and others has local partnership agreements in place with RCN, one of Colombia's top programming companies, and RTI, one of the country's largest provider of TV content. Also signing on with Sky are newspaper El Tiempo and Datos y Mensajes, a television news programming outfit.
The Colombian service will initially offer 75 channels of video, pay-per-view and audio selections. Local Colombian channels will also be offered.
In addition to News Corp. and TCI International, Sky is backed by Mexico's Grupo Televisa and Brazil's Organizacoes
Japan's PerfecTV and Japan Sky Broadcasting are in negotiations to merge in February, according to press reports from Tokyo.
Sources close to the negotiations said officials at JSkyB and its major shareholder companies, including News Corp. and Softbank, proposed the combination to PerfecTV officials during a meeting in a Tokyo hotel.
PerfecTV is expected to accept the offer early next week, sources said, and the two companies hope to reach a basic agreement on the equal-footing merger by the end of January.
PerfecTV has been on the air since fall 1996, and is looking for additional capital for its service. JSkyB is planning to begin broad-casting in the spring, becoming the third satellite broadcaster and will be well behind in subscriber acquisition once it commences operations.
Last summer, PerfecTV and JSkyB started talking about providing joint programming technology.
A combined company would compete with DirecTV Japan, 35 percent-owned by Hughes-backed DirecTV International that launched in early December.
General Instrument/NextLevel and Sony will jointly develop digital TV technologies under a partnership in which the Japanese consumer electronics giant will buy a stake in the satellite/cable TV equipment manufacturer.
When definitive agreements are reached, Sony will purchase 7.5 million shares of GI/NextLevel common stock, approximately five percent of the current outstanding, at a price of $25 per share.
The companies said they are discussing future generations of digital cable TV devices and high definition television products, as well as incorporating new features like Sony's Home Network architecture into NextLevel's advanced digital set-top boxes. Two weeks ago, NextLevel scored a major set-top box deal with the nation's top cable TV operators to build at least 15 million set-top boxes through deals valued at more than $4.5 billion over the next three to five years. At that time, NextLevel it is changing its name back to General Instrument Corporation.
Recently, Nicaragua signed an intellectual property rights agree-ment with the United States in an effort to stamp out piracy, a fight that includes curbing illicit programming delivered by satellite.
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and three other Republican senators participated in the signing ceremony at the U.S. embassy. The agreement, the first for a Central American country and the fourth in the Latin American region, was signed by U.S. Ambassador Lino Gutierrez and Nicaragua Economy Minister Noel Sacaso.
"This intellectual property agree-ment will be a model for the region and will mean an awful lot for continued growth of trade and investment between Nicaragua and the United States," Lott said.
Nicaragua made the moves in an effort to attract U.S. investment and promote trade between the two nations.
HBO Direct, the retail arm of the premium network's DTH satellite business, and Turner Home Satellite will consolidate their C-Band packaging businesses into one operation.
Both HBO and Turner are owned by Time Warner. Mary Oldak, a vice president overseeing DTH interests at Time Warner, will be responsible for the combined businesses, which includes HBO's call center in Chicago and Turner's center in Atlanta. Eleanor Helms, executive vice president of Turner Home Satellite, will continue to oversee Turner's C-Band and DBS wholesale business as well as commercial business with the NFL Sunday Ticket, TNT, CNN/Si and the TBS Superstation.
HBO Direct offers the multi-channel HBO and Cinemax services to C-Band customers. Turner Home Satellite distributes eight Turner-owned networks.
According to PrimeStar President Dan O'Brien, equipment for the platform's new high-power service, which could debut as early as April 1998, will retail for as low as $149.
In addition, customers will continue to have the option to lease equipment.
Hearing this announcement, DBS consultant Mickey Alpert predicted that both EchoStar and DirecTV will follow PrimeStar's lead with lease options of their own. Plus, he noted, the price, which is $50 below the lowest suggested DSS and DISH system retail, will accelerate the DBS industry's continued drift toward a cellular phone marketing model, a model which Alpert believes favors PrimeStar and EchoStar, with their reliance on one or two manu-facturers, over the DSS system.
The purchase offer will become available after the closing of PrimeStar's roll-up in which the service will be restructured from a partnership to a corporation.
PrimeStar also said it will launch a year-long, $150 million marketing campaign on Super Bowl Sunday promoting its high customer satisfaction rates and challenging other direct broadcast satellite providers to meet perceptions among its medium-power sub-scribers.
PrimeStar was ranked No. 1 in customer satisfaction among cable and satellite subscribers in the J.D. Power and Associates 1997 Cable/Satellite Customer Satis-faction Study. The MSO-backed satellite service and its two competitors, DirecTV and EchoStar's DISH Network, all placed above cable operators, but PrimeStar has heavily used its No. 1 ranking to promote its offering.
The new advertising campaign includes television, print and radio ads which will appear during the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics. The same themes will be used for point-of-purchase materials provided to retailers.
The television ads "will evoke the emotional ties their service," according to PrimeStar. The print ads challenge customers to ask themselves and retailers, "How Good Can Satellite Television Get?
Microsoft will license a version of its Windows CE operating system to Tele-Communications Inc. for a minimum of 5 million advanced set-top boxes, which the cable TV giant will roll out later this year or in early 1999.
In an address before attendees of the 1998 Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates said "The price of these products has come down enough that TCI and other cable companies have the confidence to place very large orders." He didn't disclosed what the new TCI business would be worth to Microsoft.
The Microsoft-TCI pact followed an announcement Friday that Sun Microsystems would provide its Java software for the TCI set-top boxes. Java allows computer programs to run on a computer irrespective of its operating system.
The version of Windows CE that will be used in the set-top boxes has integrated support for the Internet content and technology developed by WebTV Networks.
Loral Space and Communications named Gregory Clark president and chief operating officer, succeeding Michael Targoff, who had previously said he would leave his post when a successor was identified.
Prior to his appointment, Clark served as president of the News Technology Group, a unit of News Corp. and a member of the News Corp.'s executive committee since 1994. Before that, He spent 15 years at IBM's Research Division and also as IBM's director of science and technology in Australia.
Targoff will continue serving as a member of the board of Loral-backed Globalstar Telecommunications.
PrimeStar Partners, still involved in its roll-up into a single, publicly-traded entity, continues to wait for federal approval to use two high-power orbital slots that will allow the service to expand current offerings.
PrimeStar wants to use the coveted high-power slot at 110 degrees, most of which is currently licensed to the American Sky Broadcasting consortium formed by MCI Communications and News Corp., for its proposed high-power effort. The company also wants to use spectrum at 119 degrees, currently licensed to PrimeStar partner TCI Satellite Entertainment, for a retail & commercial service. TCI launched a satellite into the slot last spring.
However, new leaders at the Federal Communications Commis-sion face a busy agenda that may delay a final decision on PrimeStar's high-power plans.
PrimeStar also faces opposition from its competitors and consumer groups who feel the cable TV-backed service may hinder multichannel competition. This week, The New York Times published an editorial opposing PrimeStar's effort to gain control of the 110-degree slot.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman William Kennard said a new report on cable rates and multichannel competition shows that cable "rates are rising, and they are rising fast."
In an annual report to Congress, the FCC said cable rates jumped 8.5 percent for the 12 months ended last July. By comparison, the Consumer Price Index rose 2.2 percent during the same period.
Kennard said the data "sends up a red flare that the competition that Congress envisioned when it sunsetted regulation of cable rates is not here and is not imminent."
Kennard didn't ask Congress to extend cable rate regulation but urged lawmakers to improve the competitive position of satellite companies.
Kennard also directed FCC staff to conduct a rapid inquiry into the rising cost of cable programming, which cable companies blame for recent rate hikes.
The report also found that cable's share of the pay-TV market dropped to 87 percent from 89 percent in 1996 Satellite firms held 9.8 percent of the market.
NextLevel/General Instrument acquired Fuba Communications Systems GmbH, a European-based manufacturer of cable television equipment based in Germany.
FCS will be integrated with GI's European operations, based in the United Kingdom, as a wholly owned subsidiary. The company said it made the acquisition in an effort to further strengthen its existing regional organization.
Legislation that will liberalize the export of encryption technology by U.S. companies is still on Congress' agenda for 1998, but the bills under consideration aren't out of the woods yet. There is controversy regarding a proposal from the FBI to have "keys" to all scrambling technologies, giving the government "back door" access to encoded transmissions. That would allow the agency to intercept communications between criminal organizations which may use satellites and other distribution means to send messages. The Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association said it has been monitoring legislation carefully because of the implications of "back door" access on video scrambling systems and the importance of signal security to the DTH satellite industry. The association also has begun working with other industry trade associations concerned with the effect "back door" access could have on their members' businesses. "Such a 'back door' access has the potential for substantial levels of signal theft on both cable and satellite services," the SBCA said. "Many bills have been stalemated so far between the pro-export Members of Congress on the one side, and those who favor the FBI approach on the other. So it is still unsure whether any agreed upon version of legislation can make it to the House floor for a vote."
Arianespace, of Evry, France, plans to finalize the purchase of 50 additional Ariane 5 launch vehicles from European industry during the first quarter of 1998. This procure-ment was announced offic-ially by Arianespace's chairman & CEO, Jean-Marie Luton, during the company's traditional new year press conference, in Paris, France, on January 7.
A first batch of 20 vehicles will be ordered for launches in 2001 and 2002. Arianespace already ordered 14 vehicles in June 1995, the first of which was sold to the European Space Agency for the third qual-ification flight (503) now expected in June.
Arianespace's first commercial launch (504) is scheduled late this year. Under current plans, the Ariane 5 launch rate will then grow from 5 flights per year to 10 in 2001 with studies for a possible extension to 14 launches per year later. Arianespace also plans to launch 10 Ariane 4s in 1998.
For this new procurement, Ariane-space negotiated a 50% reduction of production costs. Most of the launchers purchased should include improvements from the Performance 2000 and Ariane 5 Evolution pro-grams which will allow to increase the dual launch performance to geo-stationary transfer orbits from 5,900 to 7,000 and 7,400 kg respectively.
Mr. Luton also unveiled that a major launch contract for conste-llations will be announced in February by Starsem, of Suresnes, France, a joint-venture of Aerospatiale, the Russian Space Agency (RKA), the Samara Space Center and Aero-spatiale, which markets launch services on Soyuz vehicles from Baykonur, Kazakhstan.