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GTE cable TV
on Oahu put
up for sale
Americast has about
From staff and wire reports
10,000 customers hereOahu's 10,000-subscriber GTE Americast cable TV system is up for sale, along with bigger Americast units in Florida and California, owner Verizon Communications said today.
The mainland operations have about 56,000 subscribers each and the three together are worth an estimated $615 million, based on recent sales of other U.S. cable systems for about $5,000 per subscriber.
"We're looking to see if there is interest in the properties," said Bobbi Hennessey, a spokeswoman for Verizon, the telephone company formed last week when Bell Atlantic Corp. bought GTE Corp. "Of course we continue to run the properties. It's very important to keep competition in those marketplaces," she told Bloomberg News.
GTE Hawaiian Tel began sending the Americast feed to a few homes in Hawaii Kai two years ago and the local system now reaches most of Oahu. Offering more than 185 television channels, the system digitalizes and compresses the signal and sends it by air to a small antenna on each home. Return signals, such as requests for pay-per-view movies, are fed back through the phone lines.
While the system has grown on Oahu, GTE Americast in Hawaii is tiny compared to Time Warner Inc.'s Oceanic Cable system, delivered to more than 250,000 customers by high-speed, fiber-optic cable separate from the phone system.
GTE Corp. had recently hired investment bank Goldman, Sachs & Co. to help it sell the systems, Hennessey said.
On Friday, Bell Atlantic completed the $75 billion purchase of Irving, Texas-based GTE, creating the largest local-phone company in the United States New York-based Verizon is focusing on providing local, long distance and Internet service over standard copper phone lines instead of coaxial cable, which is used to carry TV broadcasts.
Verizon will try to sell the cable systems to a phone and Internet provider instead of a cable operator, Hennessey said.
