Comcast Demands $19,000 For Broadband In Yet Another Consumer Nightmare

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

For decades the U.S. newswires have been peppered with stories where somebody bought a house after being told by their ISP it had broadband access, only to realize the ISP didn’t actually serve that address. Generally, the homeowner then realizes they have to spend a stupid amount of money to pay the local telecom monopoly to extend service… or move again.

That happened again recently. A Virginia man confirmed with Comcast that they provided broadband to his new home in Washington State. Then, about four days before closing, Comcast suddenly cancelled the order. When contacted, Comcast stated they couldn’t actually provide service, and that it would cost the man $19,000 to extend service to his home:

Comcast initially told Rowny that he’d have to pay over $19,000 for a line extension. After spending a couple of months investigating his options, Rowny hired a contractor to do part of the work and paid Comcast to do the rest, for a total of about $10,000.

Even then, the work took much longer to complete than estimated, thanks in part to Comcast’s dysfunction and trademark terrible customer service. First the line couldn’t be finished because Comcast wasn’t communicating with its subcontractor. Then Comcast couldn’t finalize the billing to fire up the line because Comcast’s systems still listed service as unavailable at his address.

This flawed data, which Comcast has no incentive to fix lest it highlight market failure and monopolization, is also used to inform federal broadband mapping efforts, which also stink. It’s a big chain of dysfunction that has persisted for the better part of a generation.

Again, this same story has played out countless times. It’s part of the vast pleasures of letting U.S. telecom become highly monopolized, which results in high prices, poor customer service, and companies that aren’t incentivized to actually try very hard (because in the U.S. we have neither competent regulatory oversight nor the kind of competition needed to create genuine accountability).

This is all something well-lobbied U.S. policymakers refuse to even acknowledge, much less meaningfully address. Instead they tend to just throw billions of dollars in subsidies at monopolies and billionaires, and talk about the “digital divide” as if it were some causation-free thing that just dropped out of the sky.

Time after time, local ISPs are found to be flat out lying when they claim they can offer an essential utility (broadband), and the home buyer has little recourse thanks to the slow, steady erosion of U.S. state and federal telecom regulatory oversight.

Filed Under: broadband, cable, digital divide, high speed internet, installation, monopolies, moving, policy, regulation, telecom
Companies: comcast

Cable TV Companies Lost Nearly 5 Million Subscribers in 2021

Broadband

from the too-little-too-late dept

Remember when the cable and broadcast industry insisted that “cord cutting” (ditching traditional cable TV subscriptions) wasn’t actually a real trend? Or how, once they finally acknowledged it was a real thing, insisted that it was just a temporary fad that would abate once Millennials started having babies?

Years later and amazingly enough the very real trend shows absolutely no sign of slowing down. According to the latest data from Leichtman Research Group, major U.S. pay TV providers lost 4,700,000 subscribers in 2021. Just slightly less than the 4,870,000 subscribers they lost in 2020.

As has been consistently true in recent years, the losses have been much worse for satellite TV providers (Dish Network, DirecTV) that generally aren’t bundled with broadband in the way cable TV often is:

Top cable providers had a net loss of about 2,695,000 video subscribers in 2021 – compared to a loss of about 1,940,000 subscribers in 2020.

Other traditional pay-TV services had a net loss of about 2,890,000 subscribers in 2021 – compared to a loss of about 3,845,000 subscribers in 2020.

Cable broadband continues to be financially shielded by the fact that the dominant cable TV companies (Charter/Spectrum, Comcast) enjoy a growing monopoly over fixed-line broadband access, with 83 million Americans still living under a broadband monopoly. Said monopoly means they can simply extract any lost TV revenues through things like sneaky fees or bullshit broadband usage caps.

The 7 biggest U.S. cable TV providers now “only” have a grand total of around 41.3 million video subscribers. Consider, for context, that Netflix now has about 37 million in the U.S. alone. And the trend the cable industry spent years trying to deny (in a bid to justify high prices and inflexible cable bundles) continues on with only a very tiny slowdown.

Filed Under: broadband, cable tv, cord cutting, pay tv, satellite tv
Companies: charter spectrum, comcast, directv, dish

Comcast’s And Charter’s Broadband Monopoly Continues To Grow

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Fun fact: about 2,950,000 new subscribers signed up for broadband last year, and roughly 95 percent of them signed up with the biggest cable companies (primarily Comcast and Charter). These two cable giants’ market share continues to grow not really because they’re good — but because they’re the only option countless Americans have if they want modern-era broadband speeds.

We’ve long noted how most U.S. telcos spent the better part of the last fifteen years refusing to meaningfully upgrade (or sometimes even repair) their broadband networks. As a result, if you want a modern (100-200 Mbps, low latency, no weird restrictions) connection in America, your choice is increasingly: Comcast (unless your town is building its own broadband network).

That’s the textbook definition of market failure and monopolization (shielded by regulatory capture), but in clinical analysis of market share such concepts wind up not being mentioned at all. Take this PC Magazine analysis of the latest broadband market share data from Leichtman Research:

Cable accounted for almost all of 2020’s growth, 2.8 million and change, and most of that came from sign-ups at the two biggest internet providers in America. Comcast added 1.33 million subscribers for its Xfinity service to reach 31.9 million total, and Charter’s Spectrum service took in 1.2 million new subscribers to hit 30 million.

Analysis like this is always so sterile, lacking any context of the impact of this consolidation. As Comcast dominates a market, it exploits the lack of competition not only to routinely raise rates (even during a pandemic, as it turns out) but to also impose all manner of arbitrary usage restrictions and obnoxious, unnecessary fees, allowing it to drive up the advertised price even further.

In a bid to justify market failure, monopolization, and the corruption and regulatory capture that protects it, policymakers will often point to some looming technological innovation just over the horizon that will make all of this better without intervention. In the early 2000s it was broadband over powerline (BPL), which failed due to interference issues. Now it’s technologies like Starlink and fifth-generation (5G) wireless.

But we’ve noted repeatedly in lengthy posts how both Starlink and 5G won’t be some magical panacea. Starlink has a usage ceiling of only around 800,000 subscribers (in a country where 20-42 million lack access and another 83 million live under a monopoly). 5G can help fix some coverage gaps, but cost, reliability, and network restrictions usually don’t make it a suitable replacement for something like fiber.

As somebody who’s been covering telecom for a long time, something that has always stood out to me is how unwilling regulators, lawmakers, analysts, and even reporters are to call a duck a duck. In this case, the duck is monopolization and market failure. And it’s pretty hard to fix something you’re not even willing to describe accurately in analysis, news coverage, or pretty political speeches.

The problem (market failure and monopolization shielded by corruption and regulatory capture) is always ambiguously referred to as something else — usually using terms that eliminate any responsibility and causality. For example, the problem is most commonly referred to as the “digital divide” — a term that begs you to believe that the problem just fell from the sky, and wasn’t a conscious, multi-decade policy choice by heavily lobbied U.S. lawmakers.

Filed Under: broadband, competition
Companies: charter, comcast

Comcast Continues To Bleed Olympics Viewers After Years Of Bumbling

Failures

from the you're-not-doing-a-good-job dept

NBC (now Comcast NBC Universal) has enjoyed the rights to broadcast the US Olympics since 1998. In 2011, the company paid $4.4 billion for exclusive US broadcast rights to air the Olympics through 2020. In 2014, Comcast NBC Universal shelled out another $7.75 billion for the rights to broadcast the summer and winter Olympics in the US… until the year 2032.

Despite years of experience Comcast/NBC still struggles to provide users what they actually want. For years the cable, broadband, and broadcast giant has been criticized for refusing to air events live, spoiling some events, implementing annoying cable paywall restrictions, implementing heavy handed and generally terrible advertising, often sensationalizing coverage, avoiding controversial subjects during broadcasts, and streaming efforts that range from clumsy to scattershot.

Not too surprisingly, years of this continues to have a profound drag on viewer numbers, which are worse than ever:

“Through Tuesday, an average of 12.2 million people watched the Olympics in prime-time on NBC, cable or the Peacock streaming service, down 42 percent from the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea. The average for NBC alone was 10 million, a 47 percent drop, the Nielsen company said.”

And this was with Comcast/NBC’s attempt to goose ratings by jumping right to Olympics coverage before the Super Bowl postgame celebrations had barely started. This year’s ratings were also impacted by doping scandals, COVID, an Olympics location that barely had any snow, and disgust at the host country’s human rights abuses:

“One woman on Twitter proclaimed the Olympics were ?over for me. My lasting impression will be fake snow against a backdrop of 87 nuclear reactors in a country with a despicable human rights record during a pandemic. And kids who can look forward to years of therapy.?

While the Olympic veneer might not be what it used to be, you still have to think Comcast could boost viewership by exploiting the internet to broaden and improve coverage and provide more real-time live coverage of all events, while bundling it in a more coherent overall presentation. After all, they’ve only had two decades to perfect the formula.

Filed Under: olympics, ratings
Companies: comcast, nbc

Yet Another Telecom-Backed Think Tank Insists U.S. Broadband Is Great, Actually

Broadband

from the ignore-the-man-behind-the-curtain dept

U.S. broadband suffers from significant regional monopolization, which directly results in the country being mediocre on nearly every broadband metric that matters… be it broadband prices, coverage, speeds, and customer service. This isn’t something to debate; the data is everywhere, and anybody who has spent much time dealing with giants like AT&T or Comcast knows the sector has major problems. By developed national standards U.S. broadband is slow, expensive, inconsistently available, with terrible customer support. The cause has always been regional monopolization and the state and federal corruption that protects it.

Granted if you asked think tanks funded directly by the telecom industry, U.S. broadband is secretly fantastic, and critics are unhinged radicals. For example, the “Information Technology and Innovation Foundation,” which has AT&T, Charter, Comcast, Verizon, and T-Mobile as financial backers, penned a new report this week trying to frame every single meaningful criticism of the sector as falsehoods being spread by “radicals” and “broadband populists” exclusively looking to undermine the industry. I was tagged by the study’s author, so I guess I’m to assume I’m one of the radical populists being mentioned?

Using cherry picked data (or no data at all), the whole piece amusingly tries to argue that every major criticism of the U.S. broadband sector is false, whether we’re talking about the sector’s high prices (due to a lack of competition) to its well documented privacy scandals. The obvious motivation for the piece? The industry isn’t very happy about the continued rise of local community broadband networks as grass roots alternatives to monopoly control:

“The anticorporate broadband populists (and radicals) know that calling for the replacement of large Internet service providers (ISPs) with smaller community-based and municipal providers is likely a losing strategy.”

Of course that’s not true. Over 1,000 communities around the U.S. have started building their own broadband networks as a direct, organic, grass roots response to market failure. The movement saw renewed growth during COVID, thanks to ongoing frustration with cost and availability. Several studies (like this one out of Harvard) indicate such options often provide better, faster, cheaper service by folks with a vested interest in the communities they serve (because they often live in said communities). The solutions are far from homogenous: they come in all shapes and sizes, from local cooperatives and public/private partnerships, to broadband built on the backs of local utilities. And they’re usually tailored to local needs in a way service from AT&T, well, isn’t.

The “study” tries to frame these efforts as those of “radicals” and “socialists,” despite the fact that most community broadband networks are being built in conservative cities. Again, these folks aren’t getting into the broadband business because they’ve been spurred by “radical socialist ideology,” they’re building these networks because they’re angry about literally 30 years of market failure (and the federal failure that accompanies regulatory capture). This organic, bipartisan market response to monopolization is framed by the ITIF as some kind of nefarious plot to ruin AT&T and Comcast’s good time:

“As such, broadband populists understand that a more effective strategy is to burrow into the foundations, gradually chipping away at the credibility of the industry (which they derisively label ?Big Broadband?), and advancing endless claims about poor performance, including that U.S. corporate-provided broadband speeds are too slow, coverage and privacy protection are too limited, prices and profits are too high, and the ?pipes? are not neutral.”

The industry’s credibility isn’t in the gutter because some “radical populists” were mean to AT&T. The industry’s credibility is in the sewer for literally decades of well documented, terrible behavior, relentless bullying of competitors, high prices, slow speeds, and statistically some of the worst customer satisfaction ratings of any industry in America (really think about that last one for a moment). If the industry really wanted to thwart the movement, they could offer better, faster, cheaper service. Instead they’ve found it cheaper to lobby lawmakers into apathy (aka regulatory capture) and pay for reports that deny factual reality.

The combination of limited competition and feckless regulators means the U.S. telecom industry generally doesn’t see much accountability for market failure. If you’re a regional monopoly like AT&T or Comcast, creative, local broadband solutions with broad bipartisan public support are just about the only real, existential threat to your continued domination of a broken sector. And instead of directly addressing the problem by spending money on better support and better service, it’s far less expensive to lobby DC and portray critics as unhinged radicals exclusively interested in attacking “traditional values.”

Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, competition, lies, rob atkinson
Companies: at&t, comcast, itif, verizon

FCC Politely Tells ISPs To Stop Abusing Covid Broadband Relief Program To Rip Off Poor People

Broadband

from the yeah-maybe-stop-doing-that dept

During the COVID crisis the FCC launched the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB program), which gives lower income Americans a $50 ($75 for those in tribal lands) discount off of their broadband bill. Under the program, the government gives money to ISPs (not exactly ideal given the industry’s history of fraud), which then dole out discounts to users if they qualify. But (surprise), many found that big ISPs erected cumbersome barriers to actually getting the service, or worse, actively exploited the sign up process to force struggling low-income applicants on to more expensive plans once the initial contract ended. Very on brand.

The program was recently renamed the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) and made permanent via the infrastructure bill, albeit at a reduced discount rate of $30 a month (still $75 on tribal lands). And because the reboot requires new rules, the FCC has proposed tightening up the rules surrounding the program to ensure the large predatory ISPs don’t exploit it to make an extra buck. More specifically, the FCC says ISPs will be required to offer the discounts across all tiers, including legacy and “grandfathered” (older, possibly cheaper plans that they may not sell any more) plans:

“We also do not think that Congress intended to exclude consumers on existing legacy or grandfathered plans from participating in the Affordable Connectivity Program. We further clarify that the requirement that legacy or grandfathered plans be eligible for reimbursement does not require that providers offer such legacy or grandfathered plans to other customers, including ACP-eligible customers, that are not already on such plans.”

Basically, big ISPs were claiming that it was too technically cumbersome to provide a $30 discount to plans they no longer actively sold. Consumer groups argued this was bunk, and this was the industry’s way of tap dancing around the fact they were using a program designed to help the poor as an opportunity to upsell users (like that time Verizon Wireless tried to first throttle, then upsell, firefighters battling historic wildfires). This behavior is just who they are. It’s in their DNA after decades of being government-pampered regional monopolies that face little real accountability.

Note this is still just an FCC proposal, and will still require a vote of approval from an FCC that remains intentionally gridlocked at 2-2 commissioners. It also bears repeating that you wouldn’t need proposals like this if Congress and U.S. policymakers were willing to target the real cause of high broadband prices across the U.S.: regional monopolization, and the state and federal corruption that protects it. But we don’t, so we get these band-aid proposals big ISPs try to exploit that don’t cure the underlying disease.

That’s not to say this EBB/ACP program isn’t helping. Over 9 million homes are enrolled in the program (a total that would be higher if ISPs didn’t make the application process so cumbersome). And I’ve talked to several communities deploying their own gigabit fiber in the last month who say they’re first targeting low-income areas as part of their broader projects, where many struggling users will see bills close to $0 per month for gigabit broadband once the discount is applied. If you’re a struggling low-income American trying to survive during COVID, that’s a big deal.

Filed Under: broadband, covid, discounts, ebb, emergency broadband benefit, fcc, upselling
Companies: at&t, comcast, verizon

Fearing COVID PR Backlash, Comcast Backs Off Its Bullshit Broadband Caps In The Northeast… For Now

Broadband

from the we-will-no-longer-charge-you-extra-for-no-reason dept

Last November, Comcast quietly announced that the company would be expanding its broadband caps into the Northeast, one of the last Comcast territories where the restrictions hadn’t been imposed yet. Of course Comcast was utterly tone deaf to the fact there was a historic health and economic crisis going on, or how imposing unnecessary surcharges on consumers already struggling to make rent wasn’t a great look. In some states, like Massachusetts, lawmakers stood up to the regional monopoly, going so far as to push a law that would have banned usage caps during the pandemic.

After gaining some bad press for the behavior, Comcast initially delayed the efforts a few months, hoping that would appease folks. When it didn’t (for good reason; caps are technically unnecessary price gouging), Comcast initially stated it would push the launch off until early next year. Now, with no end to the pandemic in sight, Comcast has reconsidered that launch as well, and will be delaying caps in its Northeast markets indefinitely:

“Comcast confirmed that it won’t activate data caps and usage-based broadband policies in its Northeast division in 2022, effectively extending an earlier delay to keep the policy out of the region through the end of 2021. There’s still no telling whether Comcast will revisit the plan for 2023 and beyond.

“We don’t have plans to implement our data usage plan in our Northeast markets in 2022 at this time,” a Comcast official told Light Reading.

Massachusetts Rep. Andy Vargas had been pressuring Comcast, noting that introducing new, unnecessary price gouging efforts during an economic crisis and pandemic wasn’t a good look. He says he was told the expansion has been put on hold permanently (read: for as long as the pandemic makes Comcast look bad for nickel-and-diming users):

The problem, as we’ve noted repeatedly, is that these restrictions shouldn’t exist in the first place. The other problem is that the pause only applies to the Northeast, and only because Comcast sees notably more competition there from uncapped Verizon FiOS. The majority of Comcast markets (where there’s less or no competition) already face such arbitrary limits, and will see no reprieve, pandemic or no. As such, delaying them is more about temporarily managing PR blowback than broader change. If Comcast was serious about doing the right thing, it would eliminate caps and overage fees over the entirety of its markets.

There’s simply no technical reason for such restrictions to exist on a fixed line network in 2021. Contrary to public misconception, caps don’t help ISPs manage network bandwidth, something that can already be done with existing hardware and adequate investment. Such restrictions aren’t financially necessary either; Comcast’s flat-rate broadband margins are significant, and any “extremely heavy users” can already be shoved toward business-class tiers. Caps only have two real purposes: (1) to impose covert price hikes on uncompetitive markets without changing your advertised rates, and (2) as an anticompetitive weapon in the streaming wars (Comcast lets its own streaming content bypass such restrictions, while competitors’ services will incur users’ extra charges).

So yeah, it’s nice that Comcast customers in the Northeast get a reprieve from being ripped off for the duration of the pandemic, but there’s no change for most Comcast customers who already have to pay the company extra every month for absolutely no technical reason.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband caps, covid
Companies: comcast

U.S. Broadband Growth Slows As the Profit Party Grinds To A Halt

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

For years we’ve watched major cable TV providers lose traditional cable TV subscribers hand over fist to cheaper, more flexible streaming alternatives. It was a trend that only accelerated during COVID. Don’t feel too badly for companies like Charter and Comcast however; the companies’ growing monopoly over faster fixed-line broadband across huge swaths of the country have allowed them to recoup their pound of flesh via broadband fees (or unnecessary usage caps) without much in the way of repercussion.

But there’s signs that the cable broadband party could be slowing down. Both Comcast and Charter (Spectrum) reported the usual number of cable TV subscriber losses, but also reported significantly fewer broadband subscribers than usual:

“Charter on Friday reported 25% fewer new broadband subscribers than analysts estimated and said the overall number of new customers would fall back to 2018 levels. Comcast, which had earlier cut its subscriber forecast, reported 300,000 new internet customers Thursday, less than half the number added a year ago.”

What’s the reason for the slowdown? For one thing, the COVID telecommuting boom had artificially been boosting subscriber uptick as people struggled to work and learn from home. That’s ending as people return to something vaguely resembling normal school and work life. Charter and Comcast largely blame a slow down in the new home market, leaving them trying to wring more subscribers out of a fairly saturated subscriber base (they often don’t want to expand into new, often more rural areas because it’s not profitable enough, quickly enough, for Wall Street).

Consumers also struggling during the pandemic aren’t spending as much on services, which means downgrades to slower tiers, or cancelling service altogether and going cell phone only:

“Other factors could include a dropoff in lower-paying customers as government assisted broadband funds dry up. ?There?s clearly softness in consumer spending,? said Maribel Lopez with Lopez Research. ?They are making choices on tiers and downgrading services.?

This is where it gets interesting. With a saturated market and slowing growth, cable giants like Comcast will be forced to find a revenue boost from somewhere else to satisfy the insatiable appetite for quarter over quarter growth. Streaming isn’t going quite as they planned (Comcast took a $520 million loss on its streaming service Peacock last quarter) due to intense competition. That means increased pressure to do a lot of the dodgy shit (arbitrary usage caps, overage fees, prioritizing certain services over others) that got them in trouble in the net neutrality wars.

With the FCC effectively crippled courtesy of the Trump administration, and Comcast lobbyists busy trying to scuttle Biden appointments to mire the agency in perpetual gridlock, I wouldn’t be shocked to see Comcast and Charter come up with some aggressively idiotic new nickel-and-dime money making scheme in the next year. When a monopoly’s growth gets restricted and Wall Street grows impatient for its blood sacrifice, there’s almost always one person who winds up paying the price: the consumer. Especially when there’s neither competition nor competent regulators capable of reining in the monopoly’s worst impulses.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, fcc, growth
Companies: charter, comcast

FTC Study Highlights How 'Big Telecom' Privacy Practices Are Even Worse Than 'Big Tech'

Privacy

from the stating-the-obvious dept

I’ve noted for a few times that the very obvious dysfunction in “big tech” has proven to be the gift that keeps on giving for “big telecom.” While tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook get the entirety of (often very justified) attention for dodgy business practices and terrible judgement, telecom has basically been forgotten in the DC Policy conversation. While lawsuits and Congressional posturing all focus on expanding oversight of “big tech,” “big telecom” and “big media” have been able to lobotomize most of the oversight of its own businesses, despite engaging in all the same (and sometimes worse) dubious business practices.

An FTC report on privacy reiterated that forgetting about telecom and media was a mistake. The FTC’s latest report on privacy noted largely what most people knew: telecom and cable companies collect an absolute ocean of data on U.S. consumers, then “sell” access to that data to third parties (they usually just call it something else) without being clear about it. They then provide users with opt out and transparency tools that are intentionally cumbersome, if they work at all. This data then bounces around the internet creating potential harm and abuse among countless parties, whether stalkers, law enforcement, people pretending to be law enforcement, or other corporations.

The FTC found that many ISP and cable companies “privacy policies” are utterly theatrical in nature. As in they’re designed to be so cumbersome as to deter people from using them (which companies then use as evidence that consumers “don’t care about privacy”). Other times the “opt out” tools don’t work at all, and in some cases they result in even more user data being collected. None of this is made particularly clear to the end user:

“…rapid consolidation has allowed ISPs to access and control a much larger and broader cache of consumer data than ever before, without having to explain fully their purposes for such collection and use, much less whether such collection and use is good for consumers.”

The FTC correctly noted that as network operators, ISPs and cable companies have access to way more data than even tech giants, app makers, or advertising companies. This includes DNS data, browsing data, clickstream data (how long you spend on each site down to the second), behavioral ad information, location data, race and ethnicity data, data on which TV programs you watch, and more. The report is quick to bring up the repeated location data scandals that have plagued the wireless industry, as well as the “zombie cookie” scandals at Verizon (and briefly AT&T) that involved embedding tracker headers in each user data packet to track them around the internet (again without informing them or letting them opt out):

“Unlike traditional ad networks whose tracking consumers can block through browser or mobile device settings, consumers cannot use these tools to stop tracking by these ISPs, which use ?supercookie? technology to persistently track users,? the FTC report said.

ISPs and cable companies will usually tell the press, lawmakers, and regulators they don’t “sell” access to this data, but they still technically do. They simply call the practice something else.

Like a network security, auditing, or marketing company will get access to “anonymized” (a worthless term) user datasets as part of a broader contract for “security consultation,” “marketing and brand awareness,” or “strategic consultation.” That company will get a bit more money for whatever their broader contract is, while also often being allowed to sell that data out the back door. It’s not technically “selling access to your data” because they’ve actively just called it something else, knowing that U.S. regulators are too feckless and understaffed to dig through a tangled web of intentional complication.

Of course the FTC’s report on the terrible privacy practices of the telecom industry is just a report. Actually doing something about the problem is another issue entirely. And every time we’ve tried to do something about the problem, lobbyists scuttle it in pretty short order (like those FCC broadband privacy rules killed by a heavily-lobbied Congress before they could even take effect, or even a basic federal privacy law). And, more recently, with telecom and media giant lobbying encouragement, the entirety of DC is so fixated exclusively on the problems with tech giants, telecom and media reform has effectively been forgotten entirely.

Filed Under: big tech, competition, consolidation, ftc, privacy, telcos
Companies: at&t, comcast, verizon

Google, NBC Bring Dumb Cable TV Blackout Feuds To Streaming

Culture

from the consumers-lose dept

For years cable TV has been plagued by retrans feuds and carriage disputes that routinely end with users losing access to TV programming they pay for. Basically, broadcasters will demand a rate hike in new content negotiations, the cable TV provider will balk, and then each side blames the other for failing to strike a new agreement on time like reasonable adults. That repeatedly results in content being blacked out for months, without consumers ever getting a refund. After a few months, the two sides strike a new confidential deal, your bill goes up, and nobody much cares how that impacts the end user. Rinse, wash, repeat.

And while the shift to streaming TV has improved a lot about cable TV in general, these annoying feuds have remained. The latest case in point: Comcast NBC Universal is demanding more money from Google for the 14+ channels currently on the company’s YouTube TV live streaming platform. Google appears to be balking, resulting in NBC running a bunch of annoying banners on its channels warning about a looming blackout, and directing people to this website blaming Google for not wanting to pay more money for the same content:

In a blog post, Google notes that negotiations are ongoing, but suggests that Comcast isn’t being reasonable in negotiations:

“Our ask is that NBCU treats YouTube TV like any other TV provider. In other words, for the duration of our agreement, YouTube TV seeks the same rates that services of a similar size get from NBCU so we can continue offering YouTube TV to members at a competitive and fair price.”

As far as annoying corporate feuds go, this one isn’t all that bad. Google says it will reduce the cost of its overall service by $10 should users lose access to NBC content after September 30 (traditionally, cable providers haven’t been willing to lower their rates at all). Still, you’re going to be seeing a lot more of these kinds of feuds as telecoms, cable TV companies, app makers, “big tech,” and even hardware vendors like Roku all attempt to battle for not only viewership eyeballs, but access to user data collection revenues.

The problem is, consumers shouldn’t be the ones paying the price for two companies’ failure to negotiate new contracts like adults. For a moment there it looked like the FCC might update its rules to force companies to negotiate in good faith (and more importantly penalize companies that take out out their negotiating incompetence on paying subscribers) but as a movement it generally went nowhere. U.S. regulators genuinely view these feuds as just “boys being boys,” and routinely don’t care whether it results in paying subscribers losing access to content they have, in many cases, already paid for.

Filed Under: blackouts, cable, carriage disputes, retrans, streaming, tv
Companies: comcast, google, nbc universal, youtube