USDTV

» see usdtv.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

When American television went digital, every broadcaster got a slice of spectrum wide enough for far more than the one channel most of them put on it. The leftover capacity sat there, owned by local stations with no particular use for it. U.S. Digital Television was formed in June 2003 by Steve Lindsley to buy that leftover capacity wholesale and sell it back to viewers as a cable package.

The pitch was a number. Nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents a month bought eleven cable channels, from ESPN to the Food Network, delivered through the air to a set-top box the company sold you. There was no installer to book and no contract with a cable operator. The slogan on the marketing was the low cost alternative to cable, and the slogan on the logo was shorter: TV for people.

It started as a test in Salt Lake City at the end of 2003 and launched commercially on 16 March 2004, by which time a thousand people had signed up without the company advertising at all. Hisense had already ordered a hundred thousand boxes. By that September there were more than ten thousand subscribers and four markets: Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, Las Vegas and Dallas. The plan on the table named thirty more markets before 2004 was out.

It never reached Turkey or anywhere else, and could not have. The whole product was a lease on American broadcast spectrum, written against American stations under American licensing, which is the kind of service that cannot be exported even in principle. What traveled instead was the idea, and it kept coming back under other names for the next decade.

~ the dossier ~

~ what you actually bought ~

A USDTV customer got a USDIGITAL receiver and an antenna in the attic or on the roof. The box was on shelves at Walmart nationwide and at RC Willey in the western states, and outside the four live markets it worked as an ordinary digital tuner, which meant the company was seeding hardware into homes it could not yet sell to. Installation was handled by two outside firms, and anyone willing to mount the antenna themselves got two months free.

USDTV was not a cable company without the cable. It was a tenant. Every channel it sold rode on bandwidth belonging to a broadcaster who had agreed to rent it, which made the local stations both its suppliers and its landlords.

In September 2005 five of those broadcast groups put $26 million into the company: Hearst-Argyle, McGraw-Hill, News Corporation's Fox station arm, LIN TV and Morgan-Murphy. Lindsley said afterward that the broadcasters who invested did not believe the service could beat the cable companies, and withdrew their support on that basis. The same five companies were the landlords and the money at once.

~ the letter on the front page ~

The company filed for Chapter 7 in Delaware on 6 July 2006 and kept transmitting anyway, under a trustee, while two buyers circled the assets. NexGen Telecom, which had been an investor from the start, bought the whole thing that September for a reported million dollars in cash. Then NexGen took a large loss on something unrelated in the fourth quarter of 2006 and could not find bridge funding anywhere else.

What went up on usdtv.com in March 2007 is unusually plain for a dead company. Under a press release headed USDTV DISCONTINUES LOW-COST FAMILY FRIENDLY DIGITAL TV SERVICE sits an open letter that names the date and the reason in its own words, without a euphemism anywhere: the service will be turned off on Monday, March 12th, and the closure is due to a funding withdrawal from our major investor, who has experienced a financial setback in another business. The rest of the page is about the receiver. Customers could keep it, and USDTV made arrangements with an outside installation firm to convert the box so it would carry on pulling in free over-the-air channels after the subscription stopped. The last thing USDTV did was make sure its hardware outlived its service.

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