Reply #23: DirecTV Owned by Rupert Murdoch - I'll take Dish! [View All]

My local Comcast is terrible and I have been thinking about getting satellite. It sounds like a must-do!

snippet:

In the year since News Corp. won control of it, DirecTV has taken off like a rocket. Now it plans to import a bundle of interactive features from its British cousin, BSkyB. The trick will be to stay ahead of cable.
By Adam Lashinsky

If you didn't know better, chances are you wouldn't peg Britain—for years the land of the BBC and, let's face it, not much else—as one of the world's most exciting places to watch television. It wasn't. At least not until Rupert Murdoch came along. Thanks to Murdoch's British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB, a couch potato in London with a satellite dish on his roof can place an onscreen bet on a soccer game from an account maintained by Sky Television. Once the game begins, he can alternate camera angles to stay focused on his team. He even can switch off the sound on Sky's neutral sportscasters and listen instead to the FanZone, where a fellow partisan cheers and boos alongside him.

Those aren't puffed-up promotional gimmicks from a village-sized test market. They are features available to 7.4 million BSkyB customers today. When Murdoch was spending billions launching BSkyB, everyone thought interactivity was, well, so much pie in the sky. Now it's a big deal in Britain and a major reason Sky owns nearly 70% of the pay-TV market there.
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http://www.fortune.com/fortune/investing/articles/0,15114,832256,00.html