James Gattuso Quotes (8 Quotes)

The vast majority of this is a boondoggle.

The difference is that there's really not a cost advantage or economies of scale that limit the number of providers. So they're just in the pool with everyone else now.

They're seeing their entire model being threatened.

If you wanted to target the people actually in need, and assume for the sake of argument that there's a need for television, that it's a basic necessity, if you looked only at the people who don't have cable or satellite today, and looked only at the first television in the household, and not the third or the fourth, and looked at only those people who cannot afford a converter box of their own, you would be looking at a few hundred million dollars, certainly less than 500 million. That's a much, much smaller number than we have on the table now.

Congress was more concerned about constituents waking up in the morning sometime in 2009 and finding out that their televisions didn't work, and they couldn't get the sports show that they wanted. They were more concerned about that than they were about reducing the deficit or keeping taxes low or saving billions of dollars for the taxpayers.

The impediments are really technical. The biggest problem is perceived lack of quality, reliability. A lot of people are still uncertain that their Internet connection will be reliable and on all the time. There are some reports of voice quality not being as good as traditional lines. And there are questions about 911. But those are all rapidly being worked out. And the marketplace is showing that the numbers of subscribers are growing steadily.

It will become the phone industry.

This is why the Internet-phone industry is probably going to replace entirely what we might call loosely the analog method of phone calls over a period of years.