Fox And Cablevision Reach Agreement

said by UnnDunn:

Cablevision was always going to raise your rates in January. Now they have an excuse.

said by tiger72:

Last I checked, the source of almost every rate hike is due to programmers raising their rates. Programmers have the upper hand, because everyone likes to blame the cable companies for the programmers' greed.

said by jjeffeory:

NBC offers content?
Oh wait, they own USA and Syfy. Too bad NBC doesn't offer much that is compelling.

said by kpfx:

Looking at other services delivered down the exact same cable pipe..... I haven't had any price hikes to my Internet service in over 6 years (and have had several speed upgrades) and my digital phone service has actually gotten cheaper.

Yet my video rates have gotten higher.

said by N3OGH:

It's just so much fun to watch mega corporations make public arguments over million dollar deals while throwing their customers under the bus.

Just warms the heart...

said by Madtown:

They care more about the money than their customers.

A recent spate of TV blackouts and the lack of government intervention suggests that broadcasters have the upper hand over TV signal providers when it comes to negotiating fees, at least until Congress decides to act.

"Under the present system, the FCC has very few tools with which to protect consumers' interests," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a letter to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in a letter Kerry's office released Friday. "Current law does not give the agency the tools necessary to prevent service disruptions."

Battles between TV signal providers and broadcasters have been raging for years and the latest dispute wasn't the longest.

The law at the center of the debates is the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992.

It allows broadcasters like Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC to choose between forcing a TV signal distributor like Cablevision to carry its local TV station, thus boosting its audience, or bargaining for the best rate it can for so-called "retransmission consent."

The law heavily favors broadcasters in such negotiations because they have the ability to black out signals and subscribers are hard to win back if they switch TV signal providers.

David Bank, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, said it was in the best interests of the FCC to keep the balance tipped in broadcasters' favor. The FCC regulates the airwaves and it has authority over what broadcasters can send out over them. There are rules over obscenity and local content that don't apply to pay cable channels, which escape the FCC's grasp.

"That's what the FCC really cares about: minority voices on air, localism, childhood early education initiatives, obscenity," Bank said. If the balance of power were shifted to distributors, media giants could pull back from the broadcast model and move to an all-cable channel lineup. TV stations might disappear and the FCC would "lose the ability to regulate all that," Bank said.

said by Romney2012:

Just what I have been saying here for several years. That Hollywood has the upper hand and that the FCC is misguided in its emphasis on regulating cable companies when Hollywood is the major cause of increasing cable rates. Here is a news item explaining the problem and what little is being done about it. And also goes on to explain that the FCC for its own reasons is going to do little about the situation.

said by WhatNow:

Every Channel that charges the carrier a fee should be a premium channel where the carrier just collects the fee for the content provider. The carrier charges a flat rate to the customer for the connection and then adds the individual channels to the bill. If any part of the bill goes up the customer will know who to blame.

said by ARIA2:

Swith over to FIOS, Cablevision is crap, i pay 140 dollars for ultimate HD 35/35 and phone service... it comes with on demand channels and HBO showtime cinamax etc....

who the hell gives a crap about channel 12?

said by tiyuri:

If binding arbitration was good enough for Cablevision in this Fox dispute it should be good enough for them to use it to finally get MSG-HD on FiOS.....

said by HardwareGeek:

Cablevision agreed to this contract in July with a few stipulations like forcing fox to terminate business with its competitors in the NY Market. (Dish, Fios and Direct TV).

Which would mean those operators couldn't carry fox channels. Fox said NO

Pretty sure the contract they agreed to is similar to the July contract and by the way cablevision calls it unfair I'm sure they didn't get the "terminate business with competitors" clause.