Yes, a deal was announced, but many such deals are announced and nothing comes from them. You should only give credence to those that mention specific dollar figures and time frames and even then that only means there’s about a 40% chance that some variation of what’s been announced will actually happen.

You might want to check out one of Craig McCaw’s other babies: ICO Global Communications. They are attempting to leverage satellite and terrestrial like so many others over the last couple of decades. ICO’s model isn’t as aggressive as Teledesic; instead focusing on more of a satellite radio model: satellite for rural and low penetration, and terrestrial for the population centers. ICO’s first bird is going up next month.

Thanks for the link. The problem with doing a deal solely with Clearwire is that they don’t offer a mobile phone service. That means that if you have a package from DirecTV/Echostar/Clearwire, you’re paying someone else for phone services (landline/mobile). I wonder if it makes sense for Sprint and Clearwire to just tie the knot instead of being fickle on a joint venture.

Both DirecTV and Echostar have already partnered with Clearwire.

(link)

Makes you wonder why the DSL and cable companies aren’t trying a lot harder to deliver better bandwidth. The demand is there, and having a clear winner seems like a slam dunk for customer retention.

A lot of your questions are answered and feverishly debated / discussed over at dbstalk.com
Might be worth a visit. (I’m not affiliated and don’t benefit from mentioning dbstalk.com)

Cable modems, thanks to the shared bandwidth, are less well suited to video, particularly P2P (downstream traffic is nice and efficient, being managed directly by the head-end - but upstream traffic is much more problematic, which is why they dislike servers and P2P apps so much).

In theory, DirecTV could build a great system, combining server-based delivery, P2P and broadcast: with the right software, they could switch customers seamlessly between delivery mechanisms, broadcasting (say) the 100 most popular streams over satellite, a few thousand streams of niche content from a server farm and filling the gap with P2P. Obviously it needs broadband for anything other than straight broadcast content - but of course, that applies to any realistic VoD approach, and can hardly lose them customers to cable!

Well I have the same issue with Apple TV as well, and it is still hard to get the right experience on that box. Neverthless, I wanted to see if you live in suburban, rural or urban areas. I think a lot of satellite customers are in areas where broadband is patchy, at least in the US.

it would be nice to have your name. That said, is the service available at scale and how does it perform at that point. I would withhold judgement at that point. Nevertheless, you talk about p2P technologies. Can you shed some light on this? I would love to know more details.

DIRECTV owned boxes form the best p2p network out there and have the most reliable delivery mechanism. There are a number of new technologies that are turning P2P technologies into “carrier-class” delivery mechanisms. This is a great development for DIRECTV.

I don’t get your criticism on DTV vs an Apple TV which basically does the same thing.

Also, have you tried a Slingbox? Streaming a high quality tv signal doesn’t require as much bandwidth as you might think.