Uplink Uptrend: PacSat International’s Satellite Trucks Are Fixtures at News, Sports Events

By Clint Swett, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

Sep. 4–It’s not like Steve Mallory was hoping for disaster.

The owner of PacSat International, a then-fledgling company that provided satellite TV uplinks for news and sporting events, had parked his lone satellite truck outside Candlestick Park in October 1989. His contract was to beam the Giants-A’s World Series game to Sports Channel America.

Then the 6.9 Loma Prieta quake struck right before game time, knocking out power and phone lines, and his vehicle became one of the few ways that clamoring TV crews could file their stories.

He was besieged by reporters and producers eager to pay $750 for 15 minutes of satellite time.

“Loma Prieta was the turning point,” said Mallory, a former foreign correspondent for NBC News. “After that, everyone understood the capabilities” of the satellite truck uplink industry.

And it helped transform PacSat from a company that was barely breaking even to one that is consistently profitable, with 14 satellite trucks in eight Western cities.

PacSat trucks, some costing more than $1 million each, provided news networks with TV pictures from June’s Angora fire at Lake Tahoe and news uplinks to ESPN for Barry Bonds’ record-breaking homer in San Francisco last month.

They are fixtures at most major sporting events, from the Olympics to the Super Bowl. And they cruised the streets of Brentwood during O.J. Simpson’s murder trial.

In 2001, a veteran PacSat employee hauled a portable dish called a “flyaway” over mountainous territory into Afghanistan for CNN just before the U.S. invasion. Before that tricky assignment, the company delivered a dish to Lima, Peru, that allowed ABC News to cover the guerrilla siege of the Japanese embassy in 1997.

The 64-year-old Mallory has built a 35-person organization that offers not only the latest in satellite truck technology but also camera crews, interview studios and post-production facilities for putting together TV and radio commercials for the likes of Intel, Raley’s and Comcast.

The privately held midtown Sacramento company doesn’t disclose revenue or profit, but satellite service doesn’t come cheap. PacSat trucks rent for between $2,500 and $5,000 a day. Satellite time is an extra $800 to $1,000 an hour, though most networks already have dedicated satellite time, Mallory said.

Mallory’s spacious office overflows with books and magazines, crammed into bookshelves and piled on the floor. Photos of family, mementos of his 10-year career as a foreign correspondent, and knickknacks related to his passion for Formula 1 auto racing cover every horizontal surface.

Though he operates in a realm of more than 300 satellite uplink providers in North America, Mallory said his most serious competition comes from major companies like Crawford Satellite Services out of Atlanta and PSSI Global, headquartered in Las Vegas.

Mallory attributes much of his success to a background in TV news, rather than in engineering and electronics, where many of his other competitors have roots. “I can’t even program my own cell phone,” he joked.

The main concern for TV producers, he said, is reliability — sending video feeds clearly and on time.

“I never missed a shot in all my years of journalism. When it’s showtime, then it’s showtime,” he said. “We have a marvelous staff who know the urgency of the word ‘now.’ “

Indeed, PacSat has a reputation for reliability of both its crews and equipment, said Silvano Payne, chief executive and publisher of satellite-industry publications, including Satellite News Weekly.

“They are one of the most highly regarded uplink providers in the country,” Payne said. “They don’t let people down. They’re known to be extremely reliable.”

Mallory, who grew up in the San Diego area, said he first drew notice as a TV correspondent in 1976 for his coverage of the Chowchilla school bus kidnapping for NBC-owned KNBC in Los Angeles.

He leveraged that into a temporary NBC News assignment in Beirut and eventually into a decadelong stint overseas at NBC bureaus in Beirut, London, Moscow and Tokyo.

His wife, Kathy, eventually grew tired of the long overseas postings, though, so he started his own news service in Sacramento, figuring he could sell feeds to TV stations around the state.

“I hocked the farm to raise $500,000 and bought a used satellite truck,” Mallory said. “I was still in Tokyo as a full-time correspondent, and was monitoring the business from there, looking in on the red ink.”

In 1988 he arranged a buyout from NBC and embraced the satellite business full time. He was just scraping along until Loma Prieta, which earned him frequent business from the likes of NBC, CNN, the BBC and others over the following decade.

In the ensuing years, PacSat has grown substantially, branching beyond California to establish beachheads in Seattle, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Houston, Austin and Dallas. “Texas is very big for us. It’s big in both sports and news,” he said.

While satellite uplinks account for about 60 percent of PacSat’s business, the company also provides camera crews for news events, news feeds from the state Capitol, a studio for taping interviews (Maria Shriver was a recent interview subject), and facilities for taping and editing videos such as commercials and promotional material.

“They’re probably the best-known facility in town,” said Rachel Pitts, an account executive with the Sacramento office of PR firm Porter Novelli.

Pitts said she’s at PacSat studios at least once a week producing video material. “Hands down, the staff is great,” she said. “They turn stuff around for me as soon as I need it.”

Sacramento Media consultant Joaquin Ross offered similar praise, saying PacSat was one of the few local production operations equipped for high-definition, and that its staff met the tightest deadlines.

Paul Kinney, a Sacramento political consultant and media producer, said he frequently uses PacSat for high-definition camera work and for video editing.

“They have a very good environment to work in and they take good care of me,” Kinney said.

Solid figures on the size of the satellite uplink market are scarce, but Robert Bell, executive director of the Society of Satellite Professionals International, said smaller companies like PacSat thrive by providing good service and innovation.

Mallory prides himself on both. He said he was one of the first uplink companies in the nation to squeeze a satellite dish onto the roof of a van, and, more recently, one of the first to install high-definition TV equipment in his trucks.

“The key to our success is that we’ve always recognized the value of new technology,” he said.

Indeed, he’s counting on the sports networks’ appetite for HD broadcasts to boost business even more.

“The networks are cutting back on their news coverage, but sports happens all the time,” he said.

Like last Saturday when a PacSat truck was in Berkeley to provide the high-definition satellite feed for ABC’s coverage of the Cal-Tennessee football game.

“We’re increasing the number of our big satellite trucks and going back east,” Mallory said. “We’ll be coast to coast very soon.”

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

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