Valley Site Chosen as Satellite Signal Center

Motorists driving along Winnetka Avenue near Prairie Street have probably noticed the huge satellite dishes going up on a three-acre site.

The two giant dishes--soon to be joined by six more--are part of a satellite farm/headquarters building under construction for McKibben Communications--a “mom-and-pop” upstart in the teleport industry.

Now headquartered about a mile away on Bahama Street in Chatsworth, McKibben provides satellite transmission services for television broadcasters, cable companies and other customers.

The business is known in the telecommunications world as a teleport--a collection of satellite dishes that sends and receives all sorts of signals, from broadcast and cable television to Internet traffic to weather information for the military.

The company’s list of current and former customers includes ABC Television, Disney Channel, Fox Broadcasting Corp. and the National Football League, according to company Chairman Mark McKibben.

McKibben said one of his contracts, for example, is to provide a full range of cable television channels for a company called Hotelevision, which provides cable TV programming for hotels. McKibben’s satellite dishes download the cable TV signals at the company’s Bahama Street installation, then route them to all the hotels signed up for the Hotelevision service.

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Another of the company’s contracts is to provide professional sports programs originating in the United States to a big Japanese company called SkyPerfectTV! The Japanese company pays the U.S. sports leagues for the right to broadcast the games in Japan, but the Japanese company needs a way to get access to the broadcast signals. McKibben provides that access by beaming the games to Japan via satellite.

In yet another contract, McKibben sends detailed weather information to U.S. Air Force bases in Asia. McKibben gets the information from the Air Force via high-speed data cables that run into his Bahama Street operation, then sends the data overseas by satellite.

The company already has 11 satellite dishes on the roof and in the parking lot of its existing 14,000-square-foot headquarters, which houses a high-tech control room with banks of monitors and sophisticated electronic equipment that evokes images of the bridge on the Starship Enterprise.

The eight dishes to be installed at McKibben’s new 45,0000-square-foot headquarters on Penfield Street just east of Winnetka will range from about 36 to 50 feet in diameter. The company also plans to install an undetermined number of smaller dishes.

McKibben Communications was founded by McKibben and his wife, Carol, in 1995. He was a veteran of the broadcasting and telecommunications industries, having been an engineer for the Mutual Broadcasting System in the late 1970s and later a director of satellite operations at Los Angeles-based World Communications, while Carol--the company president--was a magazine editor and founder of a public relations firm.

Both agree that he’s the visionary and she’s the day-to-day operations chief who makes sure things run smoothly.

McKibben calls his new headquarters Los Angeles International MediaCenter, intentionally eschewing the term “teleport” because he considers it too limiting to describe the scope of what he plans to do at the new facility.

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He says media centers like his will soon be expanding beyond their original purpose of primarily transmitting television, cable television and other mostly video and data signals. He says movies, for example, will some day likely be sent out to theaters in digital format via satellites and fiber-optic cables, rather than in the traditional film canisters. Such a system could save film producers lots of money by eliminating the need to make so many prints of a movie and pay for their shipping, McKibben said.

The dishes, visible during construction, will soon be out of view. Steel girders will support a 36-foot-high louvered aluminum wall designed, in McKibben’s words, to “keep the good waves in and the bad waves out.”

“Good waves,” according to McKibben, are the satellite transmissions his company sends and receives on behalf of customers. “Bad waves,” he says, are the signals from the many microwave towers in the area, which could potentially interfere with his satellite signals.

The wall will also hide the huge satellite dishes from roads-eye view, he said.

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Some teleports--also known as satellite farms--are in remote areas to reduce real estate costs, but McKibben said his company needs to be closer in for several reasons.

“Because of the nature of our business, we need to be physically located where we can be connected to a variety of other networks, like fiber optics,” McKibben said.

Another reason for the Chatsworth location: “Our customers like to come in and kick the tires. They wouldn’t be able to do that if we were out in the middle of nowhere,” he said.

McKibben’s new headquarters is part of the general growth in the satellite communications industry, according to Stephen Tom, chairman of New York-based World Teleport Assn. and president of Alexandria, Va.-based Teleport Consulting Group International.

“Teleports really have their roots in handling video for broadcasters and cable operators and related services,” Tom said, but demand is rising rapidly for new telecommunications services--like relaying Internet traffic around the world.

Tom, who said he has known McKibben for at least 15 years and has done consulting work for him, said it remains to be seen what portion of that telecommunications industry growth will go to satellite installations and what portion will go to fiber-optic cable systems in coming years.

Fiber-optic cable can carry many times more information than satellites, according to Tom, but fiber-optic systems are limited in their reach and require huge investments of time and money to build. Satellite systems, by contrast, can beam their signals anywhere on Earth and can be installed relatively more quickly and cheaply than fiber-optic networks.

Tom said that means demand for fiber-optic cable and satellite services will both grow, giving companies such as McKibben the potential to expand.

However, Tom said, the question these small companies all face is how they’re going to get the capital to expand enough to take advantage of the opportunities for growth.

McKibben himself says it’s difficult for a company the size of his to grow because it has limited capital to buy new equipment to expand its capacity. Potential customers can be reluctant to sign up for services unless they know a satellite company already has the equipment to deliver those services.

Although McKibben’s company has been growing steadily--from a staff of eight when the Bahama Street facility opened in 1997 to 36 employees today--it still ranks as one of the smaller players in the industry.

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McKibben, with annual revenue exceeding $5 million, is funding its current growth with outside investments that include $3 million from an individual, Richard Wolfe, plus $1.5 million from Hauppauge, N.Y.-based Globecomm Systems Inc., a publicly held provider of satellite equipment and services.

Such investments dwarf the $60,000 or so that the McKibbens plunked down to start their company, but they still see themselves as vulnerable to bigger players.

“It’s like we’re dancing around the legs of elephants,” Mark McKibben said, suggesting that the small company could get trampled if it doesn’t watch out.

On the other hand, he said, the elephants don’t seem to mind, as long as the McKibbens of the world don’t get in their way.