The total satellite industry today is estimated to produce about 1% of global communications revenues. Anybody care to try for 2%? At the 2009 NAB Show, the World Teleport Association and Society of Satellite Professionals International produced another year of their Content Distribution Forum on the show floor. Attendance was great despite the decline in overall exhibition traffic in this year of recession, which is having such an impact on the media business. (You can view video of the sessions at www.worldteleport.orgwww.sspi.org, thanks to the support of PSSI Global Services and Echostar.)
Now, I would normally be the last person to blow my own horn (oh, really? I can hear my friends asking), but it is worth taking a couple of minutes to talk about why people came to see our content. I think it says something important about the satellite business.
When we first started presenting conference content at NAB, it was all satellite, all the time. Whatever was hot in satellite, we covered it: direct-to-home television, hybrid satellite/fiber solutions, managing bandwidth, how to launch a new DTH channel. Sometimes the audience numbers were pretty good, but mostly they were not. There were painful times when we addressed 15 people, too many of whom were friends or coworkers providing moral support to the panelists.
What a contrast to this year, when I lead a panel called "When Will the Web Kill TV?" and looked out at a standing-room-only crowd in addition to the camera streaming the session live and recording every moment for online viewing. Other topics included "Media 2.0: One Show, Many Platforms," "Monetizing Digital Media" and "Finding the Distribution Model for Mobile Video."
What made the difference? In 2007, we researched three years worth of topics, speakers and audience size – and learned something surprising. The single biggest determiner of audience size was not the time the session takes place, nor even who was speaking, though this is clearly important. It was the topic of the session. Our topics stank, I realized, because they were all satellite, all the time. That’s not what people come to NAB to learn about. Satellite is just a tool for the media & entertainment business, not something interest in itself. So we began focusing on what broadcasters want most, care most about or are most worried about. Our attendance rose sharply. We still get it wrong sometimes, but much less often.
What’s the lesson here for the satellite business? A few years ago, we were all satellite, all the time as well. Teleports were satellite uplinks, period. Satellite carriers sold commodity bandwidth, period. Satellite lived in its little silo and our customers tended to be people who already understood it. Fiber, of course, was the enemy.
Today, the business of high-bandwidth communications involving space is a lot more complicated. Teleports integrate multiple pathways, manage complex networks and offer a broad range of services. Satellite carriers own or partner with fiber carriers, own teleports, and sometimes even compete with the teleport channel that brings in a big chunk of their revenue. We seem to be absorbing the lesson that it is not about us and our technology. It is about IP, mobility, converged services across many platforms, and the ability to make it all play nicely together. Only when satellite is firmly integrated into other applications will this business truly grow. Growth may not be top-of-mind in this time of global recession but every downturn paves the way for the next upturn. The more we can get out of the silo and participate in end-to-end solutions for media, enterprise, military, government, maritime or other markets, the more successful we will become.
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Robert Bell is Executive Director of the World Teleport Association, which represents the world’s most innovative teleport operators, carriers and technology providers in 20 nations. He can be reached at rbell@worldteleport.org
