Will Your TV Provider Nickel & Dime You to Death?
By Phillip Swann
TVPredictions.com
http://www.tvpredictions.com/nickel022413.htm
Washington, D.C. (February 24, 2013) - DIRECTV, Verizon and Cablevision
are charging some and/or all subscribers a monthly $2-3 surcharge for
having regional sports channels -- even if they don't watch them.
Comcast has just revealed that it will charge owners of digital TV
adapters $2 a month, although it once offered them for free to ensure
that people could continue watching television when the nation switched
to digital signals.
And Time Warner recently assessed a new $3.95 Internet modem lease fee.
It seems that the nation's TV providers have decided to strike back at
rising programming costs by instituting small monthly fees on their
subscribers that can generate a huge amount of revenue.
The fees are added on monthly bills in small print so they often go
unnoticed by subscribers. But their impact can be enormous. The
Philadelphia Inquirer estimates that, once implemented nationally, the
Comcast $2 digital TV adapter fee can bring back $550 million a year to
the nation's largest cable operator.
The newspaper quotes Mark Cooper, a spokesman for the Consumer
Federation of America, as saying that the $2 a month levy "adds up" and
that the pay TV industry "is not sufficiently competitive to protect
consumers from abuse."
Cooper has a point. The satellite TV services have provided video
competition for cable operators in most markets, but neither Dish nor
DIRECTV offer a serious Internet plan. If you want Internet service, you
pay have to agree to pay that $3.95 every month to Time Warner. Verizon.
Verizon and AT&T offer Triple Play service, but only in select markets.
TV providers are always searching for extra revenue, but never more so
than now because sports programmers and other content providers are
dramatically upping their demands to carry their channels. In addition,
some consumers are cutting back on their pay TV monthly bills and
subscribing to streaming services such as Netflix.
Rather than try to recoup losses by raising program packages by 10
percent or more -- an action that would catch everyone's eye and
possibly cause subscriber defections -- the TV providers are dropping
small fees here and there in the hope they cause little disruption.
"The industry appears to be diversifying the ways in which it raises the
prices in an effort to minimize the sticker stock of a single headline
price increase," Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett told the Inquirer.
"The real mission is to attempt to recover the soaring cost of video
programming."
The bottom line is that viewers will have to pay closer attention to
their monthly bills. But as we noted previously, even if they catch a
new surcharge being added, they may not be able to do anything about it
unless they want to drop pay TV/Internet service entirely.
_______________________________________________
Medianews mailing list
[email protected]
http://etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews_etskywarn.net
