10 Things Cable Companies Won't Say!

[Jack 1000]

Hey All,

Good food for thought from Yahoo Finance:

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/106932/10-Things-Cable-Companies-Won%27t-Say

Jack

[ArgMeMatey]

Thanks for posting that.  Lots of truth there and not much to argue with.  

The aerial wire problem here does not seem as bad; there are horseshoes here and there, and noisy amps, but I haven't seen much of the big-diameter fiber or huge splice cases.  

They're spot-on with the programming and pricing issues.  My comparisons usually include a side-by-side of channel lineups, cost per channel, and estimates of 1-year, contract length and 5-year costs for any continuing service.  That usually helps level out the bumps and valleys in the same way that their marketing and finance people estimate penetration vs. profit.  

I advocate cleaving programming and infrastructure cleanly the way long distance and local service were split in the 1980s.  I remember the incredulous tales of cement block walls going up in the middle of central offices, but look at how far costs have come down in that industry.  

All this cross-subsidization and bundling makes it far too easy for them to hide their true costs and profit margins in various parts of their vertical monopoly.  I'd like to see one fee for maintaining my "pipe", one for the local headend, and itemized programming or package program prices.  

Eventually that will need to happen here if judges or politicians have the will, since shareholders and managers will never agree to put the brakes on the gravy train.
 
However a lot of local governments still have franchise agreements with big cable to provide free or drastically reduced-price service to schools, fire stations and so on.  These certainly affect their desire to advocate change that might benefit retail customers.  I wonder if these deals will disappear as AT&T TV and statewide regulation become more prevalent?

[gparris]

Yes, very interesting points, thank you. I have some interesting thoughts on this:

-This month's TWC billing will either tell the truth or confuse more subscribers.
If you have digital cable, the package pricing (at least on my new bill) includes the cable box/remote with the Digital Standard pricing as one price (or if you have a premium channel package with Digital Standard).
Then the pricing of the DVR service, HD package and any other boxes and DVRs is added as a separate line.

-The new law(s) or regulations that supported more competition have not been fair to all of us consumers, however; ATT U-Verse cannot enter Verizon phone service areas, so the TWC subscriber has no new competition to go to...sad.

-Finally, if the other cable franchise of the same name offers more HD/SD channels than your location does at a equal or approx. equal price:
Your local cable company won't tell you, either!
(Make that point #11 for the article).

[tencom]

If TWC is so profitable how come they lost money in the last financial quarter and why is TWC stock trading at a very low price and considered a bad buy by many financial experts  and remember good customer service costs money. I think the article was more designed to sell magazines then it was to be factual. And competition won;t lower prices because of the excesive amount of channels that are forced upon us by the programmers who only are interested in increasing there revenue especially the cable networks  that are owned by NBC, ABC, CBS, and FOX which own a large percentage of the cable networks. they are angry at cable because of the loss in ratings in their over the air networks and making sure that   cable subscribers, pay a price for lost ratings!

[ArgMeMatey]

If TWC is so profitable how come they lost money in the last financial quarter
...
competition won;t lower prices because of the excesive amount of channels that are forced upon us by the programmers who only are interested in increasing there revenue especially the cable networks  that are owned by NBC, ABC, CBS, and FOX which own a large percentage of the cable networks. they are angry at cable because of the loss in ratings in their over the air networks ...

Good points.  If they were forced to abandon their expensive and apparently unprofitable vertical monopoly approach, the "good" parts of the business would be fine and the garbage would die off and be replaced by stuff that people are willing to pay for.  

Of course they might then find out then how few of those worthless packages people are actually willing to pay for.  More good content would migrate to on demand-style networks, they would have to charge less for TV, and they could probably charge more for internet.  

Their real fear is that some day this whole idea of the "channel" may cease to exist, having been replaced by a list of programs that subscribers program to be played via their recording devices.  

Good riddance.  Now, about my daily paper disappearing from the front step?  That could be a problem.  

[tencom]

And many of these wortless neworks are owned by the  Big four OTA networks that are only interested in the income they produce!