Cox Cable Hikes Up Prices For Channels You Don't Care To Watch Thanks To Disney (6-19-03)

Once again, using their standard excuse about the rising costs of programming, and saying that cable television is still an outstanding value, I must say that Cox Communications is using the basic smoke and mirrors approach in order to convice you that their higher prices is the new prcing norm.

Like we never noticed before that it used to cost us about $20 a month for some 70 channels ten years ago before deregulation of cable rates? Cox Communications's cable value has gotten lower in value, adding little-watched channels that take up space in the Expanded Service band, not having enough balls to tell Disney that ESPN is priced too high, and not doing anything to make cable TV more affordable with all this vertical alignment of the five dominant cable channel providers after all the corporate mergers in the past decade.

Why is programming so expensive? It isn't. The cable providers just like to drain you of your hard earned money to pay for reruns of sitcoms and dramas you probably don't care to watch everyday. The programmers, Fox, AOL Time Warner, Disney, GE, Viacom, etc, are using the cable carriage fees you pay for them to line the pockets of the rich CEOs who run the crappy five broadcast networks and the stock holders who don't give a damn about you or me.

Do you actually think that it's worth $28 for Cox's Expanded Service with some 60 channels of reruns, overpaid sports packages, little watched talk shows, uninnovative concepts, dumb movie reruns, and reruns and reruns of Disney's One Saturday Morning over two channels? This is totally stupid!

Sure there's more TV channels to watch, but less interesting programming to watch. The overpaid NBA package on cable has tanked in the ratings, and we're paying ESPN $24 a year for our right to watch this Disney-owned glutton? Disney should put The "Dismal" Channel back on pay-TV, put the overpriced sports packages on a digital tier so people who want to pay for this overpriced shenanigans the programmers are performing on you can do so, while the rest of us can enjoy an extra few trips to Starbucks a year in savings.

ESPN is raising their cost to about $2.40 a month for cable to carry their signals on August 1st.

The hike comes as operators are loudly protesting the cost of programming, especially ESPN, even though the network is considered crucial by many cable and satellite companies and the price increase is in line with past years. Though Cox Cable doesn't tell you the whole story about the rate increases in their Cox Connextion flyers, we just did for you.

With so much vertical alignment of the corporate broadcasters owning their own content, you think that it would cost nothing for them to put their reruns and old movies and cartoons on their own channels for free? When will the viewers start benefitting from that in lower cable costs?

And Cox, Time Warner Cable, which also owns several cable networks, and others are doing nothing in their part to reduce the cable bills to their customers. Cable TV is the Enron bastard of television broadcasting the way they're ignorant about telling their customers the full story about where your money for Expanded Service is going to.

Cable and Satellite TV providers such as DirecTV said that they would pay it despite opposing the rate hike and also said they would try to reduce programming costs.

Industry sources said ESPN contracts typically allow the channel to raise rates up to 20 percent annually, and for years it has chosen the maximum, and the cost of ESPN for cable and satellite operators amont to more than $2 per customer per month, many times more than what other popular cable channels cost. Those costs are passed on to the subscribers' monthly bills, but not listed individually as a $2 ESPN item so to speak.

ESPN says that sports are expensive to produce (rights fees alone amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in rights fees alone for several major sports packages) and adds that the wholesale cost per subscriber amonts to roughly seven cents a day. Seven cents? That's $25.55 to you and me a year, and that's too much to pass on to a viewer to watches little or no programming ESPN offers.

Cable operator Cox Communications Inc. (which has prescence in San Diego) has been a vocal opponent of sports costs, which Chief Executive Jim Robbins on March 13 said had contributed to more than half the 12 percent increase in programming costs the company faced last year. "Under the law, we can pass the entire cost of programming on to our customers -- but what businessman in his right mind would hike prices by double digits every year?" Robbins said. "They charge us outrageous prices, and Cox has to deliver the bad news to consumers."

But Cox is still doing nothing in terms of innovating ways to put the expensive popular and unpopular channels to ala carte like it should have been done by now.

Ala carte is what the cable programmers don't want to consumer to have, and cable TV doesn't want to give up its proprietary cable addresibility method in order to charge you money to rent their descramblers. It's time we brought up the issue to our Congressional representatives that laws need to be passed to standardize the descrambling technology to be used in all future TV and VCR recording devices, eliminate the cable converter box because the TV and VCRs of the future will do the job for you, pass laws that ban Disney, Time Warner, and others from preventing cable operators to carry any and all of their channels in ala carte mode as a condition of carriage, thereby, allowing the cable operators to scramble the cable channels for the viewers who don't wish to pay outrageous prices for these channels in their homes, while receiving the other cable channels they pay for unscrambled in the normal manner of simply selecting a channel on their TV and VCR, and that's it!

With the consumer given the ability to drop and add channels the cable operator offers, the programmers will be forced to create better programming worth paying for, effectively turning all of the channels into pay TV channels, costing anywhere from one cent to $20 a month depending on content and demand.

Laws should also be passed in Congress to allow for the growth of low-power television by forcing the cable operators to carry every local broadcaster in the market they are serving on their cable system. Many new ideas by the local low power TV operators have gone unwatched and bellyup because cable never bothered to carry their channels because of the infamous "because there's no demand" excuse. Baulderdash! That's what I call it. How can there be demand for the channel if nobody knows it exists? How stupid of Cox!

Also in Congress, a law to repeal the syndicated exclusivity rule that is hurting the terrestrial broadcasters must be passed. The removal of many out-of-town signals were the result of cable operators replacing the affected programming they carried with bulletin boards or paid programming. The local broadcasters in you area are now wondering where their viewers are. Well, let me explain. When Cox removed channels 2, 4, 7, 9, 11, and 13 from the lineups for one reason or another, channels were opened up for cable channels to be carried in whole. So guess where the audience is now going to? With more choices opened up, instead of a paid programming cable show on a blacked-out channel that would have been airing duplicated programming, you're seeing an offering from a cable channel.

And why is cable complaining about duplicated programming? Their movies are duplicated over and over again and again. Why shouldn't reruns of MASH and Saved By The Bell?

So without the help of the out of town broadcasters to help free TV retain some viewers who would go to cable, thanks also to the poorly thought out copyright fee for carrying distant signals as well as the Syndicated Exclusitivy rule, cable TV has become a worse value for your dollar than it ever was when it was once a 36 channel universe, mostly with programming from the free broadcasters.

Nowadays, with cable TV getting the reruns of ER and Dawson's Creek, because the ratings for the free broadcasters won't justify their costs of carriage on their stations, the free broadcasters have replaced most of the off network reruns with crappy talk shows such as Jerry Springer, stupid dating and other reality shows, and clones of courtroom dramas.

Thanks to cable channels, the Syndicated Exclusitivy rule, and the out of town copyright fee, as well as the high cost of cable programmers who freely pass on their overinflated costs to you and me, low-rated channels that don't disappear, and lack of the cable operator's vision to foster new free broadcasters, it is no wonder that Cox Communications, among other cookie-cutter cable operators, has a very poor value to their cable channel service.

It's time to do away with the current rules the way they are and overhaul the cable TV laws to allow growth of new ideas through new local broadcasters being carried on cable, the forced reduction of cable channel fees to no more than five cents per channel, disallowing exclusive contracts for sports packages for one channel, allowing competeting cable channels to get similar sports packages to compete with Disney and Fox, getting rid of the out of town copyright fees for distant signals, declaring Syndicated Exclusitivity unconstitutional as it should be, setting a standard for TVs and VCRs to receive and pay for programming they wish to have through ala carte on all channel offerings, also making the channels on the digital tier standardized to work with all TVs and VCRs with copyright protection on pay per view movies where needed, and other ways to get the cable bills back to a reasonable $19.99 a month!

Operators gathered at a Kagan World Media conference in New York earlier in 2003 also bemoaned sports costs. Rocco Commisso, chief executive of cable operator Mediacom Communications Inc, said Disney, which reports quarterly earnings on Thursday, was making up for tough times at other units, such as cruise ships plagued by passenger illness, and theme parks. "My customers should not have to subsidize the fact that Disneyland parks aren't filled with customers, or the fact that they had to disinfect their cruise ships," Commisso told the conference.

Sure, I love to watch the big league games when I get time off from my work projects to see the ball games, but $2.55 a month to pay for the network foolishly signing overpriced contracts for what is essentially giving the leagues a 2-3 hour window to effectively promote their own sport without cost on the sports league's part is a poor way to market their sport to non-fans of the MLB, NFL, NCAA, NBA, NHL, and other leagues.

Two dollars extra a month on the subscriber's part to help subsidize an overpriced TV sports package just shows how corrupt and greedy many of the sports leagues have gotten over the past two decades with sports rights escalating higher and higher every five years and doing nothing on their part to self contain the costs of the escalating salaries of players that are overpaid for producing not enough and remaining non-stars that don't stand out to the masses like earlier generations of major league sports players did back through the early 90's.

Without marquee talent that brings in the most casual of sports fans, stadiums cannot fill, and the sports franchises lose money when they play games. The sports leagues don't bother to contain the costs of doing business. Instead, it forces cable subscribers to subsidize a sinking sports industry with surcharges from ESPN, ABC, and other networks passed on to the consumer with higher monthly cable fees that trickle down to the cable operators, and then to the cable networks that own the broadcast rights, and finally, to the sports leagues demanding high amounts of money to continue to operate a business that is loosing fans that cannot afford to pay for the costs of going to their games anymore.

Disney, which owns and operates ABC stations in New York, Los Angeles, and other cities, had a feud with Time Warner cable two years at this time over Disney's demand that TW pay more to carry their ABC stations on cable. TW responded by dropping the ABC stations from their New York city cable systems for two days, instead, showing a message saying that "Disney Has Taken ABC Away From You".

In 1999, KGTV 10, which is an ABC affilliate and is owned by McGraw-Hill Broadcasting and not Disney, had a tiff with Disney's ABC network over a similar issue. Disney, which just paid the NFL a billion dollars or so for eight years to carry their games in 1997, decided to soak their ABC affilliates such as KGTV by demanding that the TV stations, most of which cost them a lot of money to staff their news departments that provide local news programming, pay for ABC programming instead of the traditional other way around to help pay for the costs of the company's NFL package Monday nights. KGTV and other ABC affilliates responded in kind by dropping several optional carriage ABC programming from their lineups such as Port Charles, Politically Incorrect, and Mickey Mouse Works among others; some went further and replaced some of the network's dog programming with public affairs programming. The costs of sports programming isn't just hitting the cable subscribers, but it's hitting the ABC affilliates too, so much that it costs too much for any TV station in the El Centro-Yuma metro zone to afford to carry ABC in that area.

The root of the problem of escalating costs lies in the sports leagues themselves, and legislation in Congress needs to be initiated with bills that will allow cable TV operators to offer high-cost cable TV channels such as ESPN the option to be placed on an ala-carte package (digital or analog). If ESPN and other high-cost channels are placed on the analog broadband as it always was, a filter can be inserted between the feeder cable and the drop cable to block the channels for subscribers that wish to save as much as $5 a month for a package of channels they don't care to watch or pay for.

Furthermore, I wish Cox Cable could be allowed to block a couple of dozen useless cable channels I never bother to watch. Most people watch less than 12 channels regularily, so why not offer subscribers a 12 channel package of channels full of stations they reguarily watch; bigger channel packages also allowed.

Allow me to not pay for useless cable channels I never watch. Not a day goes by that I never think of tuning in Lifetime, Disney Channel, ABC Family, USA Network, Sci Fi Channel, Bravo, A&E, Food, Travel, HGTV, Animal Planet, PAX, MTV (especially MTV), VH1, BET, AMC, TCM, FX (I seen all the MASH and 90210 reruns), WB 5 and UPN 13 since Sabrina and Buffy are ending their runs and their networks are otherwise pure crap, KGTV 10 since ABC itself is not worth my time anymore, MSNBC, CNBC, Shop NBC, QVC, HSN, Court TV, TV Guide Channel, and E! That alone could save me enough money for me to afford HBO!