Behar, Robert

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Behar, Robert

(1949-)
GlobeCast America

Overview

Techno–wizard Robert Behar created a multi–billion dollar state–of–the–art telecommunications giant out of a backyard hobby. He started building a satellite behind his Miami, Florida, home in the 1970s, in order to watch the locally non–televised soccer playoffs for the World Cup. It took him four months, and he missed the Cup results. But he had successfully built one of the first home satellites and realized he was on the verge of something very big. He began building systems in the local Miami market and grew into an $18 million business. In 1998, he merged with the giant GlobeCast and became president/CEO of North American operations. The company reported 2000 revenues over $100 million. Now he has a new hobby: boating. He can watch all the soccer games he wants—from virtually anywhere on the globe, right from the berth of his yacht's cabin.

Personal Life

Havana–born Behar is the son of Enrique and Reina, who came to the U.S. from Cuba in 1960 and settled in the Miami, Florida, area. Behar was 11 years old at the time. His father ran a construction business in Florida, and his mother had a garment factory. Behar, who had always dreamed of getting into the television industry, dropped out of Miami–Dade Junior College in 1970, just three credit hours short of a degree. The reason was to take a job as a master control operator at Miami's WCKT–TV (now WSVN).

In 2000 Behar was named Executive of the Year and a recipient of the Teleport Award for Excellence in Washington, D.C. The awards are presented to companies and individuals who have dramatically demonstrated excellence in the field of teleport operations. He is married to Estrella (nee Mitrani) and has three children.

Career Details

From 1970 to 1974, Behar worked at several Miami–area television stations in various capacities, including WAJA–TV (later WLTV), where he was assistant chief engineer, and CBS Miami affiliate WTVJ–TV, where he was an editor/engineer. In 1974 he and a coworker started their own business, AB Electronics & Communications, in CB radio sales and installation. (He continued dual employment with WTVJ until 1979.) "I have always been an entrepreneur at heart," Behar told a Hispanic magazine interviewer many years later. In any event, with only $500 in capital, the two men did not see any return on their investment for a few years.

Then in 1976, the small company was awarded a contract by the Venezuelan government to install a radio system for the World Cup games from nearby Buenos Aires, Argentina. Behar got hooked on watching the games and the competition while performing on his contract. He and his workers finished the contract prior to the end of the World Cup and returned to Florida. At that time, not all Floridians shared the same enthusiasm for soccer as did, for example, Europeans and South Americans, and the games were not televised in Behar's community. Behar felt lost, unable to watch the remaining games. As the old maxim goes, "necessity is the mother of invention"; Behar decided to construct his own satellite system in his backyard to catch the final games. "I realized that this was a business and decided that I would change the focus of the company to building satellite antennas," Behar later said in an interview for Broadcasting & Cable magazine.

The company also changed its name to Hero Communications—a story in and of itself. While Behar was doing an installation in Saudi Arabia, a member of the king's court remarked, "You are going to be heroes in bringing the world together." Behar knew he was on to something big. He left his job with WTVJ late in 1979 to focus full–time on his new company. He became heavily involved with the satellite trade association SPACE (now the Satellite Broadcasting & Communications Association of America, or SBCA). In 1982, as founder and president of Hero Communications, he traveled to Washington to lobby Congress for the use of home satellites. During the lobbying rally, Behar organized a three–hour satellite broadcast, but it turned into a twelve–hour marathon of one–upsmanship as companies like HBO and Showtime scrambled his signals to avoid competition from small–timers like his company. The experience left him disappointed with the industry, and Behar decided to return to TV.

Behar then purchased a used production truck from his old station WTVJ and started his third company, Omni Video Productions, in 1985. Soon thereafter, the Hispanic Broadcasting Company retained him to produce a regular half–hour newscast for the Spanish–language broadcasting company Telemundo Productions. By 1997 Telemundo had offered to buy him out. As part of the deal, Behar was named senior vice president and chief operating officer (COO) of Telemundo Productions. But when Behar sensed operational troubles within the company, he jumped ship in 1992. (The following year, Telemundo filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.) Ultimately, the efforts of Behar and others led Congress to pass the Satellite Home Viewers Act, which prohibited the monopolizing of signals by large companies and mandated that they sell to the "backyard industry."

Chronology: Robert Behar

1949: Born in Havana, Cuba.

1960: Behar family immigrated to the U.S.

1974: Started AB Electronics & Communications.

1979: AB Electronics & Communications became Hero Communications.

1985: Started Omni Video Productions.

1998: Hero Communications merged with GlobeCast; Behar became president and CEO.

2000: Named Executive of the Year and received Teleport Award of Excellence.

Behar returned to what he knew and loved best. He organized Hero Productions, a "one–stop–shopping" teleport and television production facility. The company grew from a 3,000 square foot garage to a 60,000 square foot building. It also added post–production capability and translation services to its business. By 1997 the company posted revenues of $18 million and caught the eye of GlobeCast, the giant satellite company. GlobeCast was impressed with Behar's experience in both North American and Latin American markets. Moreover, Behar was heavily experienced in both television and satellite industries as well. Although GlobeCast, which had wanted to expand, was interested in Behar's business, it was also interested in the man. Said Michel Combs, GlobeCast's CEO at the time, in Broadcasting & Cable magazine, "We were very happy with his main skills, which in my mind are in leadership; he's a very dynamic guy, and he knows how to run a business." In 1998 the two companies merged, with Behar assuming the position of president and CEO of the surviving company, GlobeCast North America (a subsidiary of France Telecom). When re–interviewed six months later, Combs added, "I am more than happy with our decision. He has done a tremendous job with this company."

As far as Behar's comments on the merger, he later remarked in Hispanic magazine, "You look at a deal and if it makes sense, you do it, and if not, you walk away from it." He saw huge potential in joining GlobeCast. "I knew that if I wanted to see programming from the world, other people wanted programming from the U.S.," he continued. Knowing Congress had mandated that television become digital by 2001, Behar wanted to seize the opportunity to start producing programming for that pipeline.

At GlobeCast, Behar was running one of the most important satellite–transmission and production–services companies of all. GlobeCast supplied end–to–end video and audio production and transmission services for programmers such as MetroGoldwyn–Mayer and Hallmark Entertainment Networks. Speaking with Television Broadcast interviewers in 1999, Behar noted, "The digitizing of signals and the digitization of the industry is full speed ahead as of right now. . . . It's an exciting time in the teleport industry right now." Interestingly, he projected that ten years out, the technology would literally reach people's back yards. "I think the infrastructure will develop for news organizations and all broadcasters to have their own capacity because the digital onslaught will make that capacity fairly economical. People will own their own slots and will be doing their own traffic," he continued, "so [our role] will be more of the permanent service."

In 2000, GlobeCast remained the largest network origination provider in North and Latin America. Due mostly to Behar's influence, the company offered a full spectrum of technology–driven, end–to–end solutions for every segment of the global satellite broadcasting industry. This included channel distribution, multimedia and IP multicasting, Internet backbone services, global sports and special events coverage, newsgathering, business television, digital and HDTV transmission, and translation services for global programming. Behar was able to predict a growing need to provide live news coverage for news organizations; consequently, the company created its Newsforce subsidiary. Additionally, Behar continued to steer his company toward IP (Internet provider) webcasting and multicasting services, using MPEG–1 and MPEG–4 technologies to deliver high quality, full motion video and sound. GlobeCast's IP gateway on the Telstar satellite allowed the company to offer live and on–demand video and audio streaming, high speed file transfer, and webcasting in a high bandwidth, secure environment.

But that "secure" bandwidth environment was not without compromise. In 2000 one of GlobeCast's international television clients, National Iranian Television (NITV, not affiliated with any political or government organization) suffered blocked broadcast signals from a surreptitious rogue unknown party. When GlobeCast tried to send up NITV's signal, it was blocked and returned to Globecast with Eutelsat orders to stop the transmission.

A growing market that Behar predicted years ago is that of "niche content." As more people leave their native countries, the demand for esoteric broadcasts in native languages has nearly outgrown the capability. Globe-Cast has maintained itself on the forefront of the market. For some companies, programming that is so specific to such a small group of people is not economical. But state–of–the–art DT (digital transmission) transponders with steerable spotbeams on specific satellites, such as that maintained by GlobeCast, enables the company to make use of a satellite already in use for other purposes. This means a separate DTH satellite does not have to be launched in order to provide niche content services. As of 2001, GlobeCast had access to 60 satellites on 15 systems. It was broadcasting 27 niche channels, of which 21 could be viewed at no cost to a subscriber with Globe-Cast equipment. Behar anticipated this growing market and prepared the company to be available for such services. Incidentally, Behar is also the founder and chairman of HTV, the first 24–hour, all–Spanish–language television music network, which was sold to Cisneros Television Group in 1999.

In May 2000, Behar authored an article for Digital TV, entitled "There's No Shortage of Bandwidth." The article offers reassurance that there was not, and would not be, a shortage of satellite capability to handle increasing demand. Part of the speculative concern was that the Internet was taking up more and more bandwidth, creating more traffic and demanding service. Behar reminded the reader, "[Y]ou only have to look at the America Online/Time Warner merger to see where alternate supply options are opening up. The merger of these two media giants will produce high–speed, high–bandwidth Internet delivery against the background of a growing wire infrastructure." Behar did acknowledge that the conversion of full–time analog to digital signals will require a great deal of duplicate capacity through 2001.

Of more concern to Behar was the international marketplace, where fewer fiber interconnects existed between international destinations. He predicted that within the next few years, new fiber would be deployed throughout the world to meet the demand. Additionally, new satellites were being designed and built to meet the anticipated need of Internet services between Latin America and Europe, as well as in Africa and Asia. Finally, Behar informed readers that GlobeCast was adding new satellite–based services but had no need to add any new capacity to its current inventory of more than 25 transponders to service the Americas. Instead, the company would focus on developing new digital services to multiply existing capacity.

An independent report released in November 2001 by Northern Sky Research concluded that, despite current difficulties, it expected a positive long–term market for consumer broadband satellite services worldwide. The report, "Consumer Broadband Satellite Services: A Global Analysis of Key Players and Market Opportunities," included GlobeCast as one of the profiled companies. The company noted that "future Ka–band services have the potential to ignite growth by offering a faster performing service at a lower price point and bandwidth on par with terrestrial offerings." GlobeCast was already making use of some of that technology in preparing for the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, 2002. In October 2001, it announced its availability to provide broadcasters with transmission and production services at its owned–and–operated technical operations center in Salt Lake City.

Social and Economic Impact

Robert Behar possesses not only the creative ability to visualize the future but also the technical capability to make the vision a reality. His uncanny ability to forecast technological needs and markets has kept him on the top of a list of telecommunications gurus who come with crystal balls. There is always a certain excitement that attaches to his predictions as well; perhaps it is because the industry trusts him and his opinions. With Behar at the helm of GlobeCast, no doubt technology will go as far as it can to meet the needs of a global community still maturing in its vision of worldwide "live" communications.