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Media

DirecTV And Echostar: The Crystal Ball Approach

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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The folks over at Cowen & Company have a novel theory about the future of satellite TV. The research operations has a "neutral" on Echostar (DISH) and DirecTV (DTV) with price targets at about the point where they trade now.

But, the backbone of the analysis assumes that Wall St. can know how the video market will look in 2010. Cowen claims that AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ) will do so well at marketing video to consumers that "We expect telecommunications companies to gain up to 20 percent share in the 38 million homes served by 2010,"  according to an interview with The Associated Press.

There is nothing wrong with making predictions about things that will happen three years in the future, but it is probably a horrible way to make investment decisions. The Cowen theory does not say much about what will happen with cable or why it thinks that satellite TV and cable will lose so much share. Maybe the big telephone companies will give their service away.

Nice reading, bad advice.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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