The Starz Encore chairman urged cable executives to forge ahead while EchoStar and its larger satellite competitor, Hughes Electronics Corp, are preoccupied in Washington, seeking regulatory approval for their proposed merger.
"Whether it happens or not, they're going to come back with a vengeance. And probably in two or three years, when cable enters telephony against the RBOC [regional Bell operating company], which is the only remaining monopoly, the RBOCs will retaliate as well, so you're going to have that competition. And when you add the technological advances of streaming video on the Internet, that's going to add another factor," Sie said. "So cable can't just sit around and figure out, `How am I going to do VOD.'"
Video on demand is being offered to about 3 million homes nationwide, but cable operators are accelerating their efforts.
Comcast Corp -- set to become the nation's largest cable-TV operator if it completes its pending acquisition of AT&T Corp's cable division -- says it's marketing video-on-demand service to 600,000 of its digital-cable customers, and expects to double that number by year-end.
David Watson, executive vice president of sales, marketing and customer service, outlined Comcast's campaign at the CTAM conference.
"The one thing that we should not do is to `transact' the customer to death," Watson said.
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