"Netflix is starting to cannibalize cable-TV viewership and it could start cannibalizing advertising, too, " Pachter said.
One big problem: Sky Angel distributes its signals over the Internet instead of a conventional cable-TV system.
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That trend also could reinforce the perception that Netflix looms as a threat to the cable-TV industry.
Sky denied this, saying it had been supplying its sports channels to cable-TV companies since its inception.
Moreover, the incumbents face increased competition from new entrants, such as cable-TV companies, and this has hit profits.
Globo is also forging ahead on broadband Internet access through its listed subsidiary Globo Cabo, Brazil's largest cable-TV provider.
So Congress rewrote the telecom act in 1992 to ban companies affiliated with cable-TV operators from discriminating against rivals.
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Higher ratings translate into more advertising revenue, even though Comcast gets two-thirds of its revenue as a cable-TV and Internet access provider.
Set-top boxes allow cable-TV subscribers to surf the Internet from their sofas.
The five-year-old firm, a cable-TV operator with about 30, 000 Manila customers, began offering Internet-over-cable in July as an alternative to conventional dial-up access.
Pivot could be the first of many "a la carte" broadband channels offered to subscribers weary of paying for whole tiers of cable-TV networks.
The Sixth Circuit, which is based in Cincinnati, rejected a similar case involving DirecTV challenging a Kentucky law that appeared to favor cable-TV companies.
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Even PLDT, which already operates a cable-TV system and an Internet service provider, is planning to offer cable Net access, "maybe before the end of 1999, " says Samson.
Even Netflix, which many viewers prefer to bundled cable-TV channels, is itself a bundle of content, albeit available on demand and at a relatively low monthly price.
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And Sky Angel has petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to force Discovery to honor its contract under rules designed to prevent companies affiliated with cable-TV networks from discriminating against competitors.
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Although Comcast's cable networks business benefits from higher distribution fees, those fees mean higher costs for Comcast because the company is also the nation's largest provider of cable-TV services to homes.
The typical American couch spud already has a number of "boxes" attached to his television set: A VCR, a cable-TV decoder box and perhaps a videogame console like a Sony PlayStation.
We lived through comparable episodes with the cable-TV operators.
Time Warner's properties include popular magazines (Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated and Asiaweek among them), music, film and cable-TV programming, yet the company has failed to build a large audience on the Net.
After the Supreme Court decided that cable-TV systems could retransmit broadcast signals without violating copyright laws, Congress in 1976 revised the law to require broadcasters to provide compulsory licenses to their cable counterparts.
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For decades, cable-TV was basically a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
Time Warner is the second largest cable-TV operator in the U.S. Through its networks AOL can begin to offer high-speed "broadband" services such as video-on-demand and music sales over the Web to a mass market.
Playboy in the past few years has outsourced much of its media operations and shed some of the seedier aspects of its business, like its cable-TV channels, to focus on fragrance licensing and other revenue streams.
That should be enough to keep him busy, but he says his new focus is CTH, a private cable-TV operator he bought with the Vacharaphol family (No. 14), owners of the Thai Rath newspaper, for an undisclosed sum.
The majority held that by providing individual streams to consumers according to their specific commands, Aereo was less like a cable-TV system than a consumer streaming a TV show from a Slingbox in one room to a TV set in another.
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Hastings has tried to position Netflix as a supplement to cable-TV subscriptions, but that argument will become more difficult to make as Internet streaming cuts down the amount of time people spend watching traditional TV, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said.
Talk about rank, crass hypocrisy: cable-tv companies in the U.S. are aggressively offering consumers telephone service over their cable lines, and they do so without being burdened by many of the regulatory obstacles with which traditional carriers, such as SBC and Verizon, must cope.
Ivi tried to argue it was a cable-TV network for the purposes of these retransmission rights, because an exception to the Copyright Act gives cable operators the right to retransmit if they pay fees set by the Copyright Royalty Board, an arm of the Library of Congress.
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