Back on Track In Home of the Derby

Cable World, Sept 23, 2002

That doesn't mean Kelly has stopped worrying. "I always worry about competition," she says. "The best thing you can do is to continue to innovate."

Another edge Insight has over its competition is its local origination channel, ICN8. Although Nielsen doesn't measure the channel, Graff says viewers tune in for local sports coverage - especially high school football - and some of the channel's regular programming. One popular program is the annual Pet Adopt-a-thon, hosted by Insight's resident pet expert Jeff Seidenfaden, a customer service manager known around town as the Pet Guy. Locals also tune in for the channel's Friday night concert series.

As part of its community outreach, last year the system partnered with Oxygen network to offer the Young Women's Technology Fellowship, an education initiative through which 12 area students were awarded free cable modem access for a year. Over the course of the two-month program, the girls received training in HTML programming, writing, editing and interviewing, and created a website (www.louisville-ezine.org) that focused on social issues; four of the original 12 were later named Kentucky state governor's scholars. The program also won the system and Oxygen a CTPAA Beacon award.

The system is about 99% upgraded to 750 MHz, two-way capable. Right now it is served by a single master head-end and is segmented into eight primary hubs. Inside the head-end is Scientific-Atlanta broadcast satellite service equipment for reception and VideoCypher encryption technology. Both the analog and digital set-top controllers are from Motorola, which also supplies the boxes. Antec is the primary vendor for optical transport equipment, while Cisco supplies routers and CMTS for high-speed-data services.

Right now Insight is in the process of recalling faulty Motorola DCT-2000 boxes, but Brown says a lot of the company's inventory was in the warehouse, mitigating the actual number of customer recalls; only about 2,400 were in the field.

Come fall, the system will roll out a sidecar for its digital box enabling HDTV - Dusa and his team are working on marketing plans for the hi-def product, which will be available through the digital converter (without the sidecar) in the second quarter of next year. Earlier this month the team was deep in budgeting and planning meetings.

Since the system is transitioning to SeaChange VOD hardware from Diva, there currently isn't an active VOD marketing campaign. "We've elected not to market the product because we don't want people to go and have a bad experience," Dusa says. Once the transition is complete, VOD will be "relaunched." Marketing plans include direct mail and cross-channel promotions. Subscription VOD will be layered in early next year.

As a marketing guy, Dusa counts himself lucky to have at his disposal a chunk of advertising inventory to cross-promote the system's services. AT&T Media Services, which is doing business as Insight Media Advertising, handles ad insertions for the system. "Fortunately, we're getting back into the game," says Marcia W. Burris, VP and GM of the Kentucky properties. Ad sales at the system level are up 18% to 20% compared with that of last year, Burris says, and the system has a waiting list of clients for its channel dedicated solely to advertising, Ad6.