I was watching Animal Planet and I saw a cable theft commercial. I thought about it a second and I seem to recall seeing these types of commercials rather frequently.
So how bad is cable theft? Is it bad enough to require a commercial (probably, I bet)?
Wait, so there was a commerical for a cable theft device while you were watching cable ?
That’s funny.
Type “cable descrambler” into Google. LOTS of hits.
I think maybe Meatros means there was a commercial warning people AGAINST cable theft. Not advertising for descramblers.
When I moved into my house, I tried the Cable to see if it would work as a good antenna for picking up local stations. The Cable company was piping about 75 channels into my house. I used them untill I got my cable modem, when they cut them off. I don’t consider this cable theft, as the cable company was sending them, I didn’t go out and hook them up myself. I wonder how the cable company sees this?
Listen, I have cable, and I often wonder why in the hell I’m doling out this much jack to watch…a whole lot of the same crap on multiple channels. If I had some extreme fetish involving bad movies, or old movies, or “drama” shows about people who visit the ER, or poor wittle animals stuck in a tail pipe, well yeah, I could see paying $95/month for it (after my cable modem stuff). I’m about to drop it, myself. Of course, if I could find some way to cable surf for free, well then, hell yeah.
On a more serious note, I imagine cable theft is rampant, but no more so than people dumping tires in ditches because the local landfill wants $3-$5 apiece to accept them. People are gonna have trash, and they are gonna watch teevee…one way or the other, they will find a way to dispose of one and obtain the other. Cable companies have historically poor customer service records, so screw 'em. Let the teeming masses find their own happiness. <tongue in cheek…Mediacom, I already sent the check!>
DISCLAIMER: Though I am a lawyer, I am not retained by any person on this site for legal services. This opinion is neither an offer or acceptance of legal representation. If anyone has any concerns regarding their respective rights and resposibilities, they should consult competant counsel in their jusridiction before taking action.
Just a quick Google search for “cable television theft” yields:
This site says in 1999, theft cost the cable industry just south of $6.6 billion, not counting theft of pay-per-view.
OTOH, this site says $5.1 billion. As does this site.
The NCTA site confirms the $6.6 billion number.
Note: all of the above are sites from the industry. But it’s pretty clear that the cable industry thinks it’s losing a ton of money.
NotBob13 -
From what I read, it looks like you would be guilty if you knew that your predecessor was stealing cable, and you continued to receive it illegally (as in, your house was hooked up by a splitter, etc.). If they just neglected to cut off service that had previously been legally paid for and provided, I doubt you would have the requisite intent to steal. How the cable industry sees it, I dunno. this is the kind of situation that would take some research into conversion law, and, of course, answers may vary by jurisdiction.
Ok, I have a question - I currently don’t have cable.
However, when I had my condo built, I could sign up for 3 months free, which I did. After the 3 months, I cancelled the service, but continued to receive the cable signal for another 18 months.
I didn’t unplug the cord, or notify the company, or whatever. Is this illegal, seeing as I had requested a disconnection, which they agreed to and just never carried out? (Well - eventually they carried it out, but you know what I mean).
This is indeed what I meant, sorry for the confusion.
Wow, that’s a much bigger problem than I imagined. I figured it was pretty easy to steal cable, either by buying a descrambler or by altering the little green box in the back yard, but a “billion” dollar problem is way over the amount I expected.
I know I’ve seen descramblers for sale in magazines and such, how is this legal? What possible use could they have, unless for illegal cable watching?
FYI:
I work for a large MSO cable company and controlling cable theft via commercials, websites, etc. is on my table of many duties.
The loss of revenue IS huge - 6.6 billion.
Something interesting though:
My regional area consists of cable plant in 4 different states, about 1200 miles of fiber and over 350,000 subs. The number of persons prosecuted for stealing cable in the past 5 years of my being in this position?..None!
It is common practice for MSO’s to simply disconnect service to an illegal receiver of service.
Without reading all of the links, how does the cable co’s know they are losing this huge amount of money? Are they just counting people that don’t subscribe?
According to FCC regulations, if you are paying for cable tv, you cannot be required by the cable provider to use their descrambler (which they usually do not sell to you, but “rent” as part of your monthly charge). You are also permitted to hook up a splitter and a descrambler in order to hook up a second TV/VCR to permit viewing of two different channels at the same time instead of paying the cable company for a second descrambler (and paying another rental fee).
Of course, the cable companies do not advertise this fact, although if you carefully read your contract/terms of service you will find it buried somewhere (as they are legally required to do so), usually surrounded by warnings that they are not liable for any “damage” which use of outside party equipment may cause. They are also not required to assist you in hooking up other equipment or ensuring that their signal is compatible with it.
I had looked into getting a third-party descrambler about six months ago; there are a number of on-line sites advertising them. All of them provide references to the relevant FCC regulations and repeated disclaimers against the use of their products for illegal purposes. IIRC most of them run upwards of $300, as opposed to the $150 my cable company wanted to charge me for replacing my “customer-damaged” cable-box.
The cable companies are lying their asses off about cable theft. Maybe they’re being stolen from in college dorms and in poor neighborhoods, but for most folks the cable bill is high, but affordable. Their losses are probably computed the same way the cops used to compute the value of a lid of grass obtained in a pot bust, so that it had a street value of $100,000.
Cable companies are monopolies, they don’t give jack shit about customers, and they assume we’re all lying scumbags. If it weren’t for dish antennas they’d have no competition at all, and THEN we’d see the true meaning of the words “run roughshod.”
Does anybody remember the ad the cable companies ran about how after all the money they spend they barely make a fraction of a penny on every dollar? Riiiiight.
For the record, I buy the full service package with cable modem. It is a pretty good value, except that the premium cable companies play the same movies over and over again, just rotating them amongst themselves.
There is not a universal way that MSO’s calculate revenue loss by illegal users, hence the inconsistancy in total overall reported revenue loss by different reporting agencies.
A common way, however, (and the way we calculate) is as follows:
A Direct Sales/ Audit team 'works respectative areas folowing up on reported Illegal users. This team also works ‘cold’, or, randomly checks addresses that are not paying subscribers. The randomly checked addresses are, for the most part, multiple dwelling addresses or apartments. They attempt to sell service to occupied addresses and they disconnect illegal users.
Any reported illegals are then reported by the Direct Sales/ Audit team to a supervising team who collects data and compares illegal users per address checked to overall addresses in cable plant area.
For instance: DSR’s ‘cold’ check 100 addresses and find 5 illegals. Their cable plant area has 1000 subs, thus a theoretic number of 50 illegal users are in plant area. 50 illegals x 40.00 (price for standard service, average) is $2000.00. Now take that $2000.00 and multiply by 12 months and you have $24,000.00 in lost revenue for 1 year, and that is just part of it! Now add the reported abusers and it’s probably closer to $35,000.00 in lost revenue. Remember, these numbers are only for a very small (hypothetical) area of 1000 subs. If the cable plant area has 100,000 subs, you can figure an anual loss of roughly $350,000.00.
So, as you can see, 6.6 billion is a figure that is not being blown out of proportion. I would guess it is fairly accurate.
You CAN use your own descrambler, however, with most MSO’s broadcasting now via a digital signal, the descrambler needed is roughly $500.00. the rental fee to use one? about 5.00 per month.
The MSO I work for DOES advertise seperate TV’s/ seperate channels with no extra fee. THIS is one of the positives of cable over DST, DirectTV, etc.
The 6.6 billion figure is misleading.
Not all of the people stealing cable would have purchased it. I would say that many of the thievers are in the low income range and could not afford the service outright. That figure could be cut in half if stealing cable was impossible and they had to pay for their own service. IMHO of course, but it does make sense. The ACTUAL dollar loss could will never be known.
PS
EVIL CAPTOR
What the hell is a “lid”? Ive heard this term used in reference to pot in Cheech and Chong movies. I assume its an amount, or a score, but how much?
Yes, but I’ve noticed that they’ve only started offering that recently. When I had cable in my appartment 3 years ago, I had to pay extra for the tv in the bedroom to have cable attached to it. Just recently, my mother in law moved into her new condo. Even though she had it pre-wired for cable, when she had it hooked up, the cable company wanted to charge her an additional $24 to hook up the bedroom. I told her to not bother, as I could split and hook up the ends of the coax. Except of course that the cable company put a lock box on her connection to the house.
I believe it’s like an ounce.
Those types of fees (for AO’s) will soon disappear from (almost) all cable MSO’s. The market is much too competitive right now and cable companies are now offering free installation, no fee’s on AO’s, product ‘bundling’ discounts, etc. Just to keep up with the emergence of VERY competitive satellite co’s.