RENE ANSELMO TRIBUTE — (BY FRANK LOVECE) (Extension of Remarks - September 29, 1995)
[Page: E1895]
GPO's PDF
HON. BILL RICHARDSON
in the House of Representatives
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1995
- Mr. RICHARDSON. Mr. Speaker, I want to ask my colleagues to join me in paying special tribute to a remarkable individual whose long and distinguished career can forever be a symbol of determination, perseverance and audacity. Mr. Rene Anselmo , who died earlier this month from heart disease, was not only the millionaire chairman of Alpha Lyracom Space Communications, operating under the name Pan American Satellite, but also made a lasting contribution to the Hispanic community by helping to create television's Spanish International Network [SIN], now Univision.
- Reynold Vincent Anselmo was an energetic and restless young man who joined the Marines in 1942 at the age of 16, spend 3 1/2 years as a World War II tail-gunner, and completed 37 missions in the South Pacific. After the war, he enrolled in the University of Chicago's Great Books programs and after earning a theater and literature degree in 1951, he moved to Mexico where he discovered an affinity for Hispanic culture.
- In Mexico, Mr. Anselmo directed and produced television and theater shows, and in 1954 he started working for Mexico's largest media company, Televisa, selling its TV programs to other Latin American companies. His hard work and dedication attracted the attention of Mr. Emiliano Azcarraga Vidaurreta, the founder and head of Televisa, who in 1961 hired him to start up television's SIN, now Univision Two years later, Mr. Anselmo moved to New York to manage SIN and oversee the TV stations.
- At that time, Hispanics comprised less than 5 percent of the U.S. population, and the only Spanish-language stations were on the UHF channels that most TV sets were not them equipped to receive. Mr. Anselmo , however, used his Mexican connections and experience to build the business. By 1984, SIN had 400 TV stations and cable affiliates and served the more than 15 million Hispanic people in the United States who represented the fastest-growing segment of the population. SIN provided an alternative to the U.S. media, which did not pay too much attention to the Spanish community or when it did, cast it in a less than favorable stereotype.
- In 1986 SIN was under siege by the Federal Communications Commission, which claimed that SIN's ownership violated rules against ownership of United States networks by aliens. As a result, Mr. Anselmo abdicated his position in 1986 and separated from his old friend and partner Mr. Azcarraga. Instead of retiring, Mr. Anselmo founded Pan American Satellite Corp. [PanAmSat], the world's only private global satellite services company. To do this, Mr. Anselmo had to fight against steep odds to break the monopoly on satellite transmission of video images held by the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, or Intelsat owned by 120 governments, including the United States.
- Before Mr. Anselmo launched his satellite company, no one had challenged Intelsat's international monopoly. Today, PanAmSat handles a significant share of transatlantic news, transmissions by ABC, CBS, CNN and the BBC; and channels financial data for Volvo, Citibank Corp. Latino, and others.
- In addition to Mr. Anselmo's devotion to his companies, he was a loving husband, father and grandfather, and a great neighbor. In fact, he was probably best known in his hometown of Greenwich, CT not for his business success, but for his beautification of the town. Mr. Anselmo personally paid for the planting of tens of thousands of bulbs each spring.
- Not only will Greenwich, CT be a less pretty place with his passing, but all of America loses a great businessman, family man and war veteran. For a better understanding of this great man, my colleagues may be interested in reading a profile of him which was published in Continental Profiles in August 1991.
[Page: E1896] GPO's PDF
[FROM CONTINENTAL PROFILES, AUG. 1991]
(BY FRANK LOVECE)
Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's . . . well, it's a bird, as artificial satellites are affectionately called. And this particular bird is a rare duck indeed: The first privately owned, international telecommunications satellite in orbit. Not surprisingly, the guy who sent it flying is a bit of a strange bird himself.
This is Rene Anselmo, chairperson of Alpha Lyracom Space Communications, operating under the name Pan American Satellite — no relation to the airline. Prior to this particular first, he distributed American TV shows in Mexico, founded a theater company that evolved into Second City, and helped create television's Spanish International Network (SIN), now Univision. And despite having cleared a cool $100 million when he sold his SIN shares five years ago, he is far less Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko than James Whitmore as Harry Truman.
In his plush office on the second floor of a modern, red-brick low-rise in Greenwich, Connecticut, the crusty, 65-year-old Anselmo is dressed comfortably in an open-collared shirt and a pull-over sweater. Except for the halo of cigarette smoke from the Winstons he chain-smokes, he looks more ready for his grandkids than for multimillion dollar business deals.
"I don't consider myself a businessman," Anselmo says. "I guess I'm just your classic, basic promoter-entrepreneur."
That he is, with a high-tech twist. Until Anselmo came along, U.S. TV networks, news organizations, and banks needing to transmit voice, data, or video internationally had virtually no other avenue but Intelsat, a 15-satellite, 120-nation co-operative. Each member-nation has a signatory organization, generally the government PTT (post/telephone/telegraph) monopoly. In the United States, it's the Communications Satellite Corp., a publicly traded company created by an act of Congress in 1962 just for this. Known as Comsat, it enjoys a legal monopoly. And just like nature feels about vacuums, Rene Anselmo abhors monopolies.
Spurred by the deregulatory climate of the 1980's, and flush from the sale of SIN, Anselmo put up most of the $85 million needed to buy and launch his RCA-made satellite, dubbed PAS-1. It lifted off June 15, 1988 from Kourou, French Guiana, via Arianespace, the European private-rocket company-with Anselmo having no assured customers, and only about $40 million in insurance if the darned thing blew up.
Yet his pie in the sky paid off: Among other things, Pan American Satellite beamed this year's Academy Awards ceremony overseas, live: handles a significant share of transatlantic news transmissions by ABC, CBS, CNN, and BBC; and channels financial data for Volvo, Citibank Corp, Latino, and others, Financial observers say Anselmo's privately held firm should surpass its projected 1991 revenue of $25 million. The company is now well positioned in a telecommunications equipment-and-services market that the U.S. Department of Commerce predicts will be worth $1 trillion next year.
Yet even with that big a market, why start such a risky, untested venture at age 61, after having cashed in on a fortune? "Well, I gotta do something," Anselmo protests. "Satellites and broadcasting are so integrally related, and with SIN I was an early user of satellites, so it was just a natural adjunct,' he says, shrugging. "And the reason nobody ever did it before is nobody was ever allowed to do it."
This is so. It wasn't until 1984 that a Rockville, Maryland firm called Orion Network Systems began nudging the government for permission to launch a private, international telecommunications satellite (private domestic satellites are a separate and fairly common thing). Thusly nudged, President Ronald Reagan signed a 1984 document called Presidential Determination Act #85-2, allowing private satellites to compete in the Intelsat market.
"I immediately jumped in," Anselmo recalls, "because I knew all the satellite service we weren't getting — and the costs for what was available were exorbitant because it was a monopoly market. The whole system had to be changed,' he says, `and it was a nice, personally challenging thing to do."
Reynold Vincent Anselmo has had a lifetime of nice, personally challenging things to do. Born in Medford, Massachusetts, he joined the Marine Corps at 16 and spent three-and-a-half years as a World War II tail-gunner, completing 37 combat missions in the South Pacific. He came home to earn a theater and literature degree from the University of Chicago in 1951, and to found a campus theater group called Tonight at 8:30 — some of the core members later went on to create the famous troupe, Second City.
"Rene and I lived side by side in basement apartments," recalls acting teacher Paul Sills, who co-founded Second City and the two predecessor groups. "He was an interesting man, full of details. Always wore white shoes and carried an umbrella; had some of the Harvard Yard about him. What I learned from Rene was that you could actually start a theater — that you didn't need anybody's permission."
By now it was the beat 1950s, the era of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Anselmo drifted to Mexico. He liked it enough that after a brief return to the States — where he was a guest director at the Pasadena Playhouse, and met Mary Morton, his future wife — he returned to Mexico to live.
After a $25-a-week stint dramatizing Time magazine stories for the U.S. government's Voice of America radio broadcasts, Anselmo hooked up with a radio-show distributor named Paul Talbot, and began a small syndication company. When a television developed, Talbot began buying syndication rights to Americans shows and had them dubbed in Spanish; Anselmo would lease them to Mexico TV stations. Some years later, Emilio Azcarraga, founder of the Mexican TV network Televisa, S.A., hired Anselmo to start up a division to export their programs to other Spanish-speaking countries.
In 1961, Anselmo — still a Televisa employee — and other investors began buying UHF TV stations in the United States, and pioneered Spanish broadcasting here. Over the course of 25 years, that core of stations grew into SIN/Univision, with 400 TV stations and cable affiliates. Yet since it was 20 percent owned by Azcarraga, Anselmo — a U.S. native who ran it out of New York City — had to divest himself because of a complicated federal issue over whether the network was foreign-owned — which was strictly forbidden.
The incident, to Anselmo , is an example of bureaucracy and authority gone awry. Scrappy as ever, he sees the same red-tape morass in Intelsat and Comsat. "It's like Communism and Socialism in Eastern Europe," he grumbles. "You wonder how the people over there put up with that for 75 years."
He's probably overstating the case — Intelsat has done much demonstrable good, making telecommunication available to countries that otherwise couldn't afford it. Yet Anselmo's correct that as in any monopoly situation, you can't go across the street if you don't like the price or service.
Comsat charges a reported flat rate of $2,637 an hour; Pan American Satellite, between $1,000 and $2,400 an hour, depending on usage based on volume per year, with most customers paying, says Anselmo , about $1,300. Even with a few hundred added at each end for earthstation fees (included in the Comsat rate), Pan American Satellite is a bargain. And to the joy of news organizations with breaking reports, Anselmo always has a satellite transponder or two set aside for last-minute spot bookings.
He's also fighting like a bulldog for access to the international telephone systems. Known as "public switched networks" (PSNs), these phone lines are used to transmit almost everything, from voice to data. The right to compete with Intelsat in this market would be a boon to Anselmo. However, such access was specifically excluded from the Presidential Determination Act that allowed the formation of Pan American Satellite in the first place.
Not one to lie down in the face of a monopoly, Anselmo has embarked on an ambitious, seemingly quixotic campaign to remedy the situation. Tired of writing lengthy missives to politicians and bureaucrats, which he feared were not being read, Anselmo took out a paid advertisement in The New York Times, to address the situation. But this was no staid political ad. In the form of a 17-frame comic strip, it featured Anselmo and his dog taking on well-heeled lobbyists (in football regalia) and in one panel depicts Anselmo as a Kurdish refugee. The cartoon culminates with Anselmo making a plea for President Bush to "strike a blow for global telecommunications liberalization. Lift the PSN restriction now."
Most of the U.S. telecommunications industry wants Anselmo and others to have the access to PSNs: Literally dozens of telecommunications users, satellite makers, and others filed comments on his behalf with the Federal Communications Commission last February.
That prompted Intelsat to recommend Anselmo be given 100 PSN circuits to use — an amount Anselmo says is "like having a billion dollars in your pockets and saying, 'Here's a penny.'" He exaggerates, yet according to spokespersons at both Intelsat and the F.C.C., 100 circuits is, indeed, a pittance.
But the game seems destined to change. Orion Network Systems Inc. is close to launching its two satellites, and Anselmo is negotiating to order three. And chances are, every bird will be booked: The last few years have seen explosive growth in satellite news services, fax transmissions, video teleconferencing, private telephone networks, and bank/credit data communication — the latter of which increased over 40-fold from 1970 to 1985, and could soon account for 40 percent of all telecommunications traffic.
At present, however, it's still a poker game with an enormous ante. Anselmo's first satellite cost a cut-rate $47 million; slightly more advanced ones are double that now. "And launch costs have quadrupled," Anselmo says. "You have an $80 million satellite, an $80 million launch, another $32 million for insurance — and then it's $10 million a year [operating and maintenance costs] for 13 years," the average life of a communications satellite. Now add in the cost of a satellite earthstation teleport in Homestead, Florida, and 40 or so employees.
Each bird Anselmo puts up will top out, he figures, at $40 million in revenue a year. "You're making money there," Anselmo says. "But owning satellites is not a good business in itself. You have to develop services. Let's say you're an airline. You want to put in VSATs, these dishes for data, and hook up travel agencies all over the place, so they can get into the computer via satellite. Now the airline doesn't want to operate that. So you provide that service: You install the stations, take care of them, provide the satellite transmission — there's money there."
"You don't do these things to make money," Anselmo claims. "You do and you don't. I'm doing it to give me something to do, and I just love breaking up this whole monopolistic system — all these state-owned telecommunications systems that don't provide good service in their countries and don't let anyone else provide it. I'd just love to break up that system," he says, tilting his lance.
[Page: E1897] GPO's PDF
THIS SEARCH THIS DOCUMENT THIS CR ISSUE GO TO
Next Hit Forward Next Document New CR Search
Prev Hit Back Prev Document HomePage
Hit List Best Sections Daily Digest Help
Contents Display
|
