Digital Upstart
Steve Lindsley says his own family is a prime example of why his experiment in digital television, U.S. Digital Television, can succeed in the heated competition for TV eyeballs. Concerns about racy programming, not to mention bills that can exceed $100 a month, have kept digital cable and satellite service barred from his home, says the USDTV chief executive. Meanwhile, new hardware finally enabled his own broadcast service to leap a nearby ridge and bring more than 30 channels of DVD-quality video to his six anxious kids.
Lindsley grew up in Salt Lake City, where he was a walk-on quarterback for Brigham Young University, and now lives in Alpine, Utah, tucked into a mountain valley south of the city. "It was virtually uncoverable for broadcast television," says Lindsley, 44. Now his family enjoys the city's broadcast TV, plus 12 cable channels that include ESPN, Discovery, and HGTV--for $20 a month, and all through an antenna.
USDTV is a bold effort to find a niche in the crowded market for selling television programming. At a time when cable, satellite, and now even phone companies offer hundreds of channels, Lindsley's start-up is slipping in with a family-friendly, inexpensive slice of a few dozen. It's going after what he calls "cable nevers and analog onlys"--that is, the millions of Americans who have never bought cable or buy only the lower-priced, analog service.
To reach them, USDTV is piggybacking on new gear installed at broadcast stations, which by federal fiat have spent billions of dollars converting their signals from analog to digital. The best-known result is high-definition television, with its superfine images and rich surround sound. Less known is the stations' leftover spectrum. Digital is so much more efficient that even if a station is broadcasting in HDTV, it has room to transmit at least one other channel of programming.
Make a deal. The challenge is figuring out how to make money from "multicasting" on that bandwidth. Among the networks, NBC last year launched a 24-hour local weather service, ABC is planning a similar venture, and CBS is putting together an entertainment channel. But many stations are casting about for the best deal, and they're being targeted by upstarts like USDTV and the Tube, a music channel. The Tube is now appearing on the secondary channels of stations owned by Raycom Media and will soon be on Tribune and Sinclair Broadcast stations.
Unlike USDTV, the Tube is aiming at cable systems, which often are contractually bound to carry the second broadcast channels. The Tube's founder is Les Garland, who helped start MTV and VH1 when cable systems were hungry for content. These days, though, getting onto cable systems with a new service is difficult, and Garland says, "Digital broadcasts are a back door for us onto cable."
USDTV, in contrast, is a competitor to cable. By pooling secondary broadcasts from several stations in a market, USDTV delivers a cablelike menu of channels over the air to special set-top boxes. The devices look like a digital cable box but connect to an antenna instead of to a cable or satellite system.
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