As those analog waves of grainy video trickle onto your TV screen, take heart: Cable giant Tele-Communications Inc. is going to make crisp, digital video signals available to 5 million homes by the end of 1997, says TCI's top financial dog.
In a conference call Monday to ease the media into TCI's somewhat mixed fourth-quarter financial results, TCI senior vice president of finance Barney Schotters said the days of endless restructuring, massive layoffs, and constantly changing business plans are largely behind the company. Entering is a new era of certainty for the 14-million-subscriber behemoth, in which everything will be focused on digital TV.
The best part about TCI's plan is that it would saturate the market with thousands, if not millions, of digital boxes rather quickly. That would drive down their cost and make it easier for other cable companies to afford them, making such services even more widely available. The age of digital cable TV services could be dawning if TCI follows through.
What does this mean to you? Assuming that TCI makes good on its plans, it means you won't have to stick a DBS dish on your property to get high-quality digital video and sound. Instead - and this is only if you live in an area that TCI feels is an attractive place to launch digital video (if you see cows outside your window, stop reading) - TCI will replace your old converter box with a shiny new digital one. It may cost more - TCI won't say yet how much - but it would be an option. In fact, Schotters said Monday that the company has ramped up its orders of General Instrument digital boxes from the current 40,000 per month to "close to 100,000." It appears TCI is serious.
That's the rub. TCI's preliminary results showed flat subscriber growth in the fourth quarter, and internal gains of only 108,000 new subscribers for all of 1996. That translates to a modest 0.0086 percent increase from its 31 December 1995 subscriber base of 12.494 million.
And TCI is still loaded with US$14.3 billion in debt, which Schotters said Monday is down only $173 million from the third quarter. So the company would hardly seem to be in a position to spend boatloads of cash on digital boxes. TCI also has overpromised before on cable modem and telephony plans that have yet to bear significant fruit.
On the bright side, TCI posted gross revenues of $1.62 billion compared to $1.315 billion in fourth quarter 1995. So TCI executives - a battle-hardened bunch to say the least - are optimistic. Analog video slaves everywhere are hoping they're right.
