SATELLITE'S HOT PURSUIT OF CABLE

摘要

For years, dave kappeler, a 47-year-old Oshkosh (Wis.) ad salesman, was a loyal subscriber to Time Warner Cable. No longer. "Cable prices just went up and up, every six months it seems," he says. So, not long after the Dish Network began delivering local TV stations and football games featuring his beloved Green Bay Packers-at $10 less a month, to boot-Kappeler decided to make the switch. All it took was a phone call to 866-DropCable, the number of a local Dish sales agent. A lot of folks have been making similar calls as the war for subscribers has grown nastier over the last year. And it sure looks like satellite is winning. Rupert Murdoch's DirecTV Inc. and EchoStar Communications Corp.'s Dish Network racked up an astonishing 820,000 new subscribers in the first quarter, while the cable industry stagnated. The top nine providers, including leaders Comcast Corp. and Time Warner, added a mere 13,000 in total. Wall Street has taken note. Shares of the large stand-alone cable companies like Comcast Corp. and Cox Communications Inc. are down around 13% for the year, vs. the 1,3% drop for the S&P 500.