Technology Stocks
Cable Goes the Way of the Want Ads?
July 23, 2008Our roundtable this week at TWST focused on Telecom Services. We asked the analysts on the panel to tell us a little about the ongoing battle between cable operators and telecom services in terms of providing services. Donna Jaegers of Janco Partners talked about the possibility of a complete shift in the service model in the near future:
“As opposed to seeing the economic recovery as a V or a U, I think it’s shaped more like an L. Unless oil prices come down dramatically, the consumer will take a long time to reliquify their balance sheet. That may push people to really think about how much they are spending on video programming in their household and is it really worth it, when they could just download the stuff they want off of the Web…
You have players like Qwest Communications (Q), that are just offering higher speeds and don’t have a IPTV-like product yet. As long as you have a high-speed connection and more and more of the programs moving over the Internet, you may get the model really shifting for the cable companies and putting them in tough waters. This is similar to how craigslist has eaten up the want ads from the newspapers and has pushed them into a real secular change…
Long term, the cable guys are going to have to think about how they are going to repackage and remerchandize their video programming because people aren’t necessarily just going to assume that they need to pay $50 plus per month for video. They are going to look at the other sources they have available to them.”
For the complete Telecom Services roundtable, including an overview of the last year in Telecom Services and stock picks, click here.
