Re: veto power?

[Garrett Wollman <wollman>]

<<On Wed, 1 Dec 1999 04:18:15 -0500, chrisbeckwith@bigfoot.com said:

> Primestar used to be owned by a coalition of cable companies but was
> purchased by DirecTv (a unit of Hughes Electronics.)  Echostar is
> the owner of Dish.

Don't forget that Hughes (which is a unit of General Motors) also
bought out USSB, so that it's now possible to get both Time-Warner and
Viacom cable channels from the same operator, DirecTV.  (Previously,
DirecTV and USSB shared satellite space on DirecTV's satellites, and
each had exclusive contracts with popular programming providers, so
that you had to subscribe to both services in order to get, say, MTV
and CNN.)  IIRC, EchoStar is partly owned by Liberty Media, which is
owned by AT&T.

ObBroadcast: EchoStar uses the European DVB system for digital video.
Like ATSC in the US, DVB is based on the MPEG-2 FlexMux facility.  DVB
uses an older audio codec and provides a different set of standard
resolutions and ``system service'' (metainformation) channels.

-GAWollman

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