Business
Bundle cable and cell phone has long been the goal of many phone or cable
companies. The great AT & T spent billions of billions to purchase the cable
companies. The merger and its debts caused AT & T 's fall. The triple-play of
high-speed data, telephony and TV are shaping up. Now it comes the quadruple
play, a service bundle that includes high-speed data, telephony, TV and
wireless.
Cable companies also believe that packaging wireless service with existing
services such as high-speed Internet access, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
and television will make them more attractive to consumers compared to their
telephone competitors. Many cable companies, like Time Warner Cable and
Cablevision, have done well in their push to sell customers a package of
services. In the last year, Time Warner has seen an especially huge increase in
the number of VoIP customers it serves.
But experts say the really exciting part of the deal is what is expected to
happen down the road, when the cable companies and Sprint integrate their
services in ways in which wireline and wireless phone companies have not yet
done.
"The problem with bundles is that you have to pay customers to take them by
giving them a discount," said Craig Moffett, an equities analyst at Sanford C.
Bernstein. "But if there is an opportunity to create unique products that aren't
available on their own, there is potential for something interesting."
Some of the new product ideas that Sprint Nextel and the cable companies have
talked about include a converged wireline-wireless voice mailbox, access to
unique video content and the ability to remotely control digital video
recorders, or DVRs. The details of these services haven't yet been worked out.
But with services like mobile video, it's easy to see how cable companies such
as Time Warner Cable and Comcast, which own some of their own content, could use
Sprint Nextel's wireless network as a new sales channel.
At least one analyst wonders if the partnership between the cable companies and
Sprint Nextel could actually help accelerate the nascent mobile TV market. In
September 2005, only 2.14 million people watched video on their phones, compared
to 15.6 million people who downloaded ring tones, according to M:Metrics, a
research firm that measures the mobile market. With 181 million wireless
subscribers in the United States, mobile TV still has a lot of room for growth.
