USSB

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

~ the goodbye ~

On 17 June 1994 two separate companies began selling television off the same satellites, to the same 18-inch dish. DirecTV sold the general lineup. USSB sold the films. If you wanted both, and almost everyone did, you subscribed twice and received two bills for one piece of hardware bolted to your roof.

USSB belonged to Stanley S. Hubbard. Hubbard Broadcasting had been in television since the industry started, and Hubbard had been arguing for direct broadcast satellite since 1981, when the company filed for one of the first DBS licenses in the United States. He spent thirteen years waiting for the technology and the regulators to arrive at the same place.

The split lineup was structural rather than accidental. The FCC had handed out the 101 degrees west orbital slot in pieces, and Hughes ended up with most of the transponders while USSB got five. Five is not enough for a general-interest service, so USSB bought what five transponders can carry, which was premium film. HBO ran on several feeds alongside Showtime and Cinemax, with a block of Viacom cable networks filling the rest.

None of this was reachable from where I was. American DBS in the nineties meant a mailing address and a credit check, and Turkish satellite television in the same years ran off different birds and different companies entirely.

~ the chronicle ~

~ two bills, one dish ~

The arrangement held while the dish was the scarce thing. Early subscribers wanted out of cable badly enough to tolerate two account numbers and two customer service queues, and the industry press treated the double billing as a quirk of a young market rather than a defect.

10 March 1998 is when it stopped holding. Viacom moved everything except the Showtime networks over to DirecTV. USSB backfilled with fXM and Showtime Extreme, but the direction of travel was now obvious to anyone reading the trades: the partner it shared a satellite with was buying the programming out from underneath it.

~ the sale ~

Hughes announced in December 1998 that it would buy USSB's assets and fold them into DirecTV. The headline figure was $1.3 billion. The revealing figure was buried in the trade coverage, which put USSB at roughly two million subscribers and noted that DirecTV would gain only 200,000 of them, because everybody else already paid both companies. Hughes was not buying customers. It was buying five transponders and the end of a billing problem.

The merger closed on 20 May 1999. Payment reached former USSB shareholders that July, about $360 million in cash plus 22.6 million shares of GM Class H stock, and the channels were folded into the DirecTV lineup the same month. Hubbard Broadcasting is still there in St. Paul. The company it spent eighteen years getting into orbit lasted five years selling from it.

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