Verizon's Big TV Bet Pays Off

VERIZON'S BIG TV BET PAYS OFF
[SOURCE: Business Week, AUTHOR: Steve Rosenbush]
Although much-criticized two years ago, Verizon's push into the TV market is starting to pay off. Revenues from the effort are surging, and Verizon's TV service is helping to stem the loss of telephone customers to cable rivals. Verizon is adding nearly 2,000 television customers a day, seven days a week. Even Comcast, Verizon's largest cable competitor, is publicly acknowledging that it's feeling the heat. At the end of the second quarter, Verizon had laid enough fiber cable to offer TV service to 3.9 million homes. But by the end of 2010, the company expects to have fiber in at least 18 million households in its traditional East Coast territory, more than four times the potential customers it has today. If cable rivals such as Comcast and Cablevision Systems are under pressure now, it's only going to get worse. By investing in fiber, Verizon has the ability to offer essentially unlimited bandwidth. The company has the capacity to offer consumers Internet connections of 100 megabits (Mb) or more should they demand it. And the fiber network, called FiOS, allows Verizon to provide TV signals without resorting to compression. Rivals from AT&T to the cable companies typically compress some of their channels because they have less bandwidth.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2007/tc20070928_484223...