Small-Dish Satellite System Is Well-Received : Communications: The product is off to the fastest sales launch of any consumer electronics product. It captures as many as 175 channels.
The satellite dish, once a symbol of the space age and ultra-high technology, has turned into one of the most down-to-earth home appliances--a TV receiver.
Kenny Weissert bought a small-dish satellite recently and now his 3-year-old daughter watches the same cartoons he did growing up.
“To me, that is a plus because a lot of the cartoons today are so far-fetched,” said Weissert, who said The Cartoon Network is one of the TV program services his family can now get in their home near Ivanhoe, Tex.
The RCA Digital Satellite System that Weissert bought is off to the fastest sales launch of any consumer electronics product.
The system comes in $700 and $900 configurations and has monthly program fees that start at $17. Its 18-inch dish captures as many as 175 channels, including 25 music services and pay-per-view movies and sports.
Thomson Consumer Electronics, parent of the RCA brand, began selling the device in Jackson, Miss., last summer and rolled it out nationally in September. By the end of 1994, about 600,000 were sold, an amount three times greater than the first full-year sales of VCRs in 1977.
“Demand is clearly in excess of supply,” said Michael O’Hara, general manager for the product at Thomson. “We anticipate it’s going to remain like that until some time in the second quarter of 1995.”
Thomson accelerated production earlier than planned and has scaled back advertising for the system, he said. Programming is sold by DirectTV, a unit of GM Hughes Electronics Corp., and by USSB, a division of Hubbard Broadcasting Inc.
Because the signals are digital, in the language of computers, they can be controlled and cleaned up by the receiver, resulting in a clearer picture than cable TV and CD-quality sound.
The success comes when a record 25 million TVs were estimated to have been sold last year in the United States, a stunning number considering there are 97 million households.
Some retailers say the new satellite system is helping sell TVs.
“We have seen a much bigger demand for better TVs with this because the picture has such high resolution and the sound is so much better,” said Thomas Freeman, vice president of merchandising for Sound Advice, a 21-store electronics retailer based in Dania, Fla.
The popularity of DSS shows there’s room for new technology in TV, which in the past 20 years has become dominated by cable rather than broadcast delivery. It also raises the prospect of a more prominent role for satellites in future data and phone systems, although that’s hard to measure.
“There’s certainly a niche to be carved out,” said Scott Pollak, telecommunications analyst at G2 Research in Mountain View, Calif.
“As to whether this becomes the way in which more communication is done, you bump into the fact we’re a wire-line society. There’s a lot of investment in wired systems and it’s hard to let that go.”
Sales of the RCA system have been more broadly based than retailers typically see with a new electronics item.
“Usually we go through a cycle of people, innovators, people who want to be the first on the block,” said Chuck Cebuhar, vice president of home electronics and home office products at Sears Roebuck & Co. “This is one time where we’ve got a cross-section of people buying at the start.”
More people are buying it in suburban and rural areas, particularly places without access to cable, he said.
But dish owner Weissert said, “I would have this over cable any day. I think it will eventually hurt cable companies.”
He waited several months for his system to come into the Curtis Mathes TV store in nearby Bonham, Tex.
Store owner Terry Roberts sold six large satellite systems in November to people who were looking for the smaller device but didn’t want to wait.
The supply crunch may ease when more companies start selling the system, possibly in March. Hughes gave Thomson exclusive selling rights for 18 months or 1 million units, whichever came first, and it appears it will be the 1 million units. Sony is the second company to have rights to the system.
“There are pretty strong opportunities for years to come,” said Yuki Nozoe, senior vice president of marketing for consumer products at Sony Electronics Corp.
