Cablevision of Long Island
111 Crossways Park Drive
Woodbury, NY 11797
Mr. Dolan:
I’ll admit I don’t watch TV all that often. After last years YES network fiasco, where Yankees games were blacked out for the entire 2002 season and now, with the introduction of your new channel layout, I think I have every right in the world to file a complaint.
To put it bluntly, your service sucks. You and your marauding band of thieving bastards pull $75 month out of my nose for what? Probably the worst cable service this side of the Mississippi River.
Yeah, I admit I supported cable deregulation in the hopes competition from the phone companies would help establish a fair market value for your services, but unfortunately your lobbyists saw to the fact that day will never come.
You hype the fact you offer 100 channels. Bullshit, you’re not even close. You then go and have the unmitigated audacity to hire telemarketers to call me at home selling more channel options, slickly packaged as digital cable for an additional $10 a month. How dare you.
The way I see it, your 100 channels are a huge rip-off. Let’s do the math.
Channels 2-99 = 98 Stations
Minus 9 Non-designated Channels = 89
Minus 6 Broadcast Stations = 83
Minus 2 UHF Stations = 81
Minus 3 Public TV Station = 78
Minus 7 Pay-Per-Views = 71
OK, so your telemarketer’s claims are off by about 30%. That’s still substantially less then the percentage I feel I’m being overcharged every 15th of the month when I get your bill.
I realize I sound like Bruce Springsteen here, but do people even watch most of the 70 channels you offer?
I mean shit, 5 Shop-at-Home Stations? You have your own fucking strip mall smack dab in the middle of my channel directory.
And Christ, what is it with all these Spanish language stations? Do we really need 5 of them in an area where less than 4% of the population doesn’t speak English? Where do you draw the line anyway? What’s next: Russian, Korean and Chinese language stations? I begrudgingly mail my check to Cablevision of Long Island, not Cablevision of Mexico City, San Juan or Santiago.
The way I see it, you clowns string your wires on the taxpayer’s utility poles. If I ever meet the local politicians who let you get away with the shit you pull, they’ll assuredly get an earful from me.
Why do I even do business with your firm in the first place? Because frankly, you’re the only gig in town. I could cancel my service, but the static I’d get from both my TV and my kids would be even worse to put up with.
Enjoy your monopoly, your Knicks & Rangers franchises and your windfall profits while they last. I look forward to the day a viable satellite or alternative cable system rolls into town.
Sincerely yours (because I have no other options),
$55.43 where I live, I don’t pay extra to get premium channels like HBO or Cinemax, but I still get two TMC channels, all the History and Discovery channels, Love Stories, Mystery, True Life, Action and Western movie channels…
I wouldn’t go back to cable even if they paid me (which, believe it or not, they’ve offered to do.)
It depends on where you live. Some areas (like mine) will give you a waiver so you can get the local channels. I’m not sure what the waiver is all about, all I know is that the Orlando area the local channels were available for an extra $3-4 a month.
Plus, with the Dish, you can select what channels you see when you surf. So I delete all the religious, Spanish, and shopping channels from my view and surf over what I’m interested in.
Oh, yeah, there’s also about 40-50 music channels, and around Christmas they have a music channel for Christmas music.
In the interest of good taste, I’d prefer to give the definition via a Google link as opposed to just go blurting it out. Keep in mind, I meant it in the figurative, as opposed to the literal, sense.
FWIIW, when the clowns string the wires on the taxpayer’s poles, they pay a franchise fee (on Long Island, it runs from 3-5% of revenues). If the poles are owned by the phone company or the electric utility, they pay rent to those guys, too.
Also, the public access stations are mandated by the FCC and local franchise agreements. And when isn’t a broadcast channel, whether UHF or VHF or whether PBS or otherwise, still not a channel?
And yeah, I think Charlie can hook you up with the NYC stations in your town. Call him and check.
FWIW manhattan, are a lot of the poles down there public property?
Upstate, they’re mostly owned by either the phone company or the electric company, and other carriers have to get attachment agreements. The owning company is responsible for maintaining the municipal franchise.
Dunno specifically about L.I. Cable companies pay franchise fees in any event, and pay pole fees separately if the poles are owned by the other utilities.
You do realize that the New York Yankees are directly responsible for this, no? You do realize that if the cable company caved in and decided to pay for those Yankee games, every subscriber’s rates would increase by about $2 a month, no?
The actions of sports entertainment providers border on criminal. In my town, nearly half of all of the cable company’s programming costs go directly to sports programming.
Interestingly enough, cable companies were de-regulated when cable companies were raking in tons of money for their stockholders. Within the past five years, nearly every cable company in America has flirted with bankruptcy. The ones that are still around are the ones that have survived.
Cable deregulation involved deregulation of the signal as well. When people were allowed to start installing their own outlets, those consumers started costing the cable company millions of dollars. Locally, our cable company has a very good service policy…they don’t charge a penny to service outlets which they installed. However, they do charge $20 per outlet to fix the messes the consumers have made. Nonetheless, they end up fixing those outlets for free anyway in an effort to promote customer service. Unfortunately, the customer’s response is usually “my service sucked for two days, I want a credit”, not “you fixed my messed up wiring for free, I owe you one”.
What you state is common policy throughout the television industry. You can take the non-designated channels off the list (I’m presuming that is the mid-band, channels 14-22, which is notorious for ingress). Marketing those channels is simply absurd (in other words, I’m with you there).
However, broadcast stations are indeed part of the cable package. As are UHF stations and public access stations. Carrying those stations costs the cable compnay money. Furthermore, advertising pay-per-view as part of the package is the norm in the industry. There is not a single MSO in the nation (including DirecTV and DISH) who does not advertise as such. In other words, it sounds like your cable company is offering 89 cable channels. You have the right to compain in that regard, but the only part of the complaint that belongs in the argument is the complaint about the non-designated channels (I am making an assumption here, but I believe those channels are indeed being designated to carry digital signal. Bandwidth is just too valuable to not use it for something.) Interestingly enough, those nine channels of digital signal contain the bandwidth to air almost 200 digital channels.)
If the channel is in your lineup, someone watches it. My biggest example is E!. We do not carry E! any more locally because the big guys at the network chose to ignore the cable company’s desire to renegotiate the contract three years ago when it expired. Cable actually carried E! for almost a year after the contract was up. Taking a quick look at demographics told the cable company that, since E! was one of the five lowest rated networks in their channel plan, dropping it wouldn’t cause much of a rift.
They couldn’t have been more wrong. Fans of Howard Stern tend to be very vocal. Despite this, the cable company received a strong arm of support from the population in general for dropping the channel…and replacing it with Food Network.
The problem is…there are hundreds of channels available. Everybody has a favorite. However, no matter what company the consumer is going to be stuck with, there is going to be a channel that one wants that is not going to be on the basic plan.
I’ve done the math. Five years ago, I paid $33.95 a month for basic cable which consisted of 45 channels. That cost is now $37.50 a month…and it has everything I need. That is 52 channels. I chip in an extra $8.95 a month for a digital receiver which provides the Interactive TV Guide. Another $4 a month goes for an extra 25 channels (ESPNews is on this tier, so I simply cannot do without it). That equals a total of $50.45 for 77 channels. PLUS (this is a relevant argument regardless of what you think of the insistance of DirecTV about 8 years ago that they should be able to include these channels in advertising their packages), I get 36 channels of pay-per-view and six more channels of pay-per-view porn. PLUS I get 40 channels of commercial free music (provided by DMX). There are six channels to which I frequently listen. That equals 125 channels all told when I take the music channels to which I don’t listen out of the equation.
I’ve priced DISH, DirecTV, as well as other cable companies around the nation. In order to get the 20-25 channels I watch, I’d need to get three different packages. The cost would average around $70 a month. Ironically, the lowest of these (Midcontinent, Charter, and Cable One are the lowest) tend to be about what I actually pay. The highest (DirecTV) would cost about $125 a month and I would still be missing what I view to be the two most essential channels (FOX and ABC). There were many companies (Cox, AT&T, Time Warner) which would cost more than $100.
So, one can see that even though the mean total was around $70, the median total was over $100.
The problem with these price comparisons is that they are so difficult to do. I give credit to DirecTV and DISH. In their advertisements, they line up exactly what the consumer is going to get very well. Most cable companies make it very difficult for the consumer to actually see what is on the lineups.
Shop-at-home networks keep your rates down.
I dunno…I often wonder why my cable company only offers 1 spanish channel (a pay-channel, nonetheless) in an area where close to 20% of the population speaks Spanish as their native language. I guess I feel that 20% of our channels should be Spanish speaking.
I have yet to see a city that owns its own utility poles. These poles are generally rented from the power and phone companies…and there are even a few poles in my city that are owned by the cable company.
[bold]Why do I even do business with your firm in the first place? Because frankly, you’re the only gig in town. I could cancel my service, but the static I’d get from both my TV and my kids would be even worse to put up with.[/bold]
You mean you can’t get a dish? Are you aware that if cable was “ripping people off”, they would be out of business?
But my question is: what exactly is this shit they are trying to pull?
[bold]Enjoy your monopoly,[/bold]
Cable television is not, and never was, a monopoly. There are other alternatives…and when there wasn’t, the companies were regulated as utilities. Most cable companies are entitled to a franchise as allowed by the city government. This is allowed because it, like power, phone, and gas, keeps the consumer’s rates down.
Viable satellite has existed since before cable was “de-regulated”. Furthermore, alternative cable systems will drive your rates up. A company takes a lot bigger of a hit if there are fewer subscribers per foot of plant.
All totals calculated, a cable company ends up paying over $100,000 to run a feeder line into a neighborhood of eight houses. That doesn’t include the fiber that feeds the node. That doesn’t include the trunk line that feeds the feeder. That only includes one apmplifier and two taps…and the fact that the cable company has to pay $20,000 to have a piece of feeder line bored under a roadway. Have you ever heard of anyone accidentally cutting a cable when digging? There is a reason the cable company charges five figures for these mishaps…that is how much they cost to fix…and God forbid if anyone every cuts a piece of fiber.
Two years ago, our cable company undertook a project to rebore a piece of fiber under a major interstate that was being torn apart. Their new construction plan resulted in a roadway that would plow right through the center of a piece of fiber that was then buried four feet below the surface with the consent of the city and federal governments. When that consent was revoked, the cable company footed the bill to relay the fiber while knocking an entire city out of cable for six hours. The cost? $1.5 million. The cable subscribers are the ones who ultimately paid for it (rates were raised by $2 a subscriber that year).
Meet the Lafayette Utilities System branch of the Lafayette Consolidated Government, here in lovely Lafayette, LA, population 110,000. My electic bill gets mailed off to the city government every month (or, more accurately, rushed down to their office at the last possible minute every month). According to their webpage, their rates are among the lowest of the nation. Having never paid an electricity bill anywhere else, I don’t really have anything to compare it to. My last bill shows $93.75 for 1425 KWH. Make of that what you will.
Now, I have no idea whether or how much they charge the cable company for use of their poles, but I just wanted to point out that there are cities like this. I’m not sure how common they are, but they’re out there.
The rest of your post was very interesting. I wish cable companies would make some of those things clearer. It may even prevent a few of us from hating our providers for reasons that are out of their hands.
Thank you for the information, neutron. I guess I have now seen a city (actually, a few of them as I have did some research since posting that comment) where the poles are owned by the taxpayers. However, this still accounts for a minute percentage of the total poles across the country. The rest of your post was very interesting. I wish cable companies would make some of those things clearer. It may even prevent a few of us from hating our providers for reasons that are out of their hands.
Cable companies try to do this. However, cable companies are also in a situation where they can too easily piss off too many powerful people. If I go and tell someone that ESPN and ESPN2 are, together, costing him over $1 a month, he just may send a letter to ESPN citing the cable company’s words. Throw in a few of those calls, and suddenly ESPN doesn’t want to do business with the cable company anymore.
There is a big war going on between MSO’s and the actual owners of the programming. There is legislation pending to do away with many of the near-criminal practices in which those programmers engage. The most severe of those actions is the situaiton regarding Yankee games in NYC. We have a similar situation here where FOX currently has access to Twins games…but choose to air other programming instead much of the time. The cable company gets a SEVERE subscriber backalsh for every Twins game that isn’t aired (along with a threat to switch to a dish where they wouldn’t be getting ANY Twins games without chipping in about $200 extra a year) even though our contract with the Twins franchise explicitly states that we are only allowed to air 146 of the 162 Twins games per year. The worst was during the playoffs last year when the local FOX affiliate chose to air the Yankees instead of the Twins. What a mess that created in the largest Twins metro market outside of the Twin Cities. Thankfully, the cable company was able to find a loophole that superceded FOX and a place to air the game (they “stole” ESPN’s feed and aired it on a local access channel). Twins fans in the area missed the first inning and a half.
While cable companies are not perfect either, I lay most of the blame on the television stations themselves along with the sports franchises. It is ugly business all around simply because everyone involved does, in fact, have a franchise on certain products.
I just wish there was a better way to educate the public on how dirty the business really is. If it wasn’t for FOX Football on Sundays, I would have FOX completely boycotted. Remember…FOX is directly responsible for In Demand PPV (Cable TV’s largest PPV provider) not getting access to NFL’s Sunday ticket a few months back.
I’d like to echo neutron star’s sentiments and thank bjohn13 for presenting the cable companies side of the issue in a fair and even-tempered manner. I believe in the free enterprise system and would never expect any cable company to operate at a 0 profit.
I’m working on a few assumptions here and admitting to the fact I don’t the ins and outs of the cable industry.
Who knows, with the improvements being made in wireless technologies, perhaps one day the cost of feeder lines / fiber optics will become moot.
That being said, let me ask you a question:
What if the cable industry was to totally and completely revamp the way it does business?
As you pointed out, “There is a big war going on between MSO’s and the actual owners of the programming” and that you lay “most of the blame on the television stations themselves along with the sports franchises.”
If I understand things correctly, with the exception of the shopping channels and C-SPAN, the cable companies pay the owners of the programming either a flat rate or a fee per subscriber based on a negotiated price and depending on how they have their “tiers” set-up.
With the exception of the premium, commercial-free stations, and similar to the network/affiliate broadcasters relationship, the programmers make revenue from the cable industry’s subscriber fees and advertising. The cable industry gets it’s revenue from individual subscribers and from local advertising; selling commercial time between the programmers ads.
Am I correct so far? If I am, OK back to my question…What if the cable industry was to totally and completely revamp the way it does business?
Not that I’m certain the technology could handle this, but let’s say the cable industry told the programmers, “We are no longer offering our subscribers tier service. From now on, every channel we offer will be al a carte. From this day forward, there will be no such thing as basic service, family tiers, platinum levels, etc., etc. If our subscribers want to watch the programming you offer, they’ll notify us of their choice(s) and we will bill them and pay you accordingly.”
Wouldn’t the programmers literally drop their pants and all but eliminate the fees they collect from the cable companies? If the market was dictated through the end-users choices, imagine how many people would opt to drop The Food Network (for example) because they had to pay (I don’t know 25¢), for it?
The way I see it, in the days before FOX, UPN and the WB, local independent stations (who like most cable channel programmers of today) offered re-runs and a few of their own productions & made money without charging anyone a fee. Why do the cable programmers of today think they’re entitled to one and why do the cable companies pay it?
Maybe I don’t understand the situation correctly, but if a substantial portion of my cable bill goes toward fees paid to TNT, the Travel Channel, et al, I’d prefer my cable provider inform the programmers of these networks I don’t want their channels and they could then pass the savings back to me.
We had digital cable for a while. It was advertised and having a bajillion channels available. What they didn’t advertise was that, for example, 4 or those channels were HBO. Not variants or HBO East/HBO West - 4 identical HBO channels. In fact, all of the premium channels were at least duplicated or triplicated in the channel line up. I could watch Six Feet Under on channel 2, channel 54, channel 80-something, and channel 500-something. Same show, same time, 4 channels.
Yeah, I dumped digital - between the duplicate channels and the constant pixellation, it wasn’t worth the aggravation. Plus I don’t like TV that much, and once my husband moved north, there was no reason to keep all the channels. So now I have Extended Basic and a single HBO. And Cable Internet. But I still hate the cable company.