It’s back again.  For at least the last decade, the trade press has speculated about whether Cablevision would survive as an independent cable operator in an increasingly concentrated industry, where the big players get bigger, and the smaller operators exit the cable business.

Charles Dolan, Cablevision CEO

The Dolan family, which has owned Cablevision since its founding on Long Island, is routinely said to be cash crunched, looking for a healthy cash bonanza on the way out the door, or dealing with internal family dramas which pit those advocating a sell off against those who wish to keep the business running.  When Cablevision launched its Voom HD satellite service, which turned out to be a disaster and money pit, the intensity of speculation achieved a fever pitch, and that was several years ago.  The Dolan family still runs Cablevision.

The New York Times sports page, of all places, is the latest home of pondering a sell off of Cablevision’s remaining cable systems to Time Warner Cable to raise cash for the Dolan family’s sports ventures, including ownership of the Rangers, Knicks, and Madison Square Garden.  It was all borne from a single line in the latest earnings report from Cablevision, which indicated the company intended to “explore the spinoff of its Madison Square Garden business.”

Cablevision's Service Area in Northeastern US

Cablevision’s bread-and-butter business is supplying cable television, broadband lines and Internet phone service to 3.1 million subscribers in the New York metropolitan area. The company, based in Bethpage, N.Y., has faced stiff competition from Verizon, which has spent heavily to build a fiber-optic network that competes with it and Time Warner Cable.

Industry analysts have speculated that Cablevision may eventually sell the entire company to Time Warner Cable, or sell its sports entertainment group to raise cash to compete in the cable business.

“Cablevision watchers [and we’d put ourselves in that category] have long pondered possible endgames, and the notion that the Dolans would retain ownership of MSG and the New York sports teams long after the rest of the assets had been divested has always been viewed as among the most likely outcomes,” Craig Moffett, a senior analyst at Bernstein Research wrote in a report after Cablevision’s earnings release Thursday morning.

People have grown old pondering questions like this.  Cablevision is positioned to compete just fine with Verizon FiOS after completing an aggressive rollout of DOCSIS 3.  Cablevision does not compete with Time Warner Cable at all.  Industry boosters have traditionally cheered on consolidation efforts, so it’s no surprise even the smallest tidbit will restart the Spec-U-Plex all over again.  Should Cablevision decide to sell, Time Warner Cable would almost certainly be the buyer, because their largest cluster of systems are adjacent to existing Time Warner franchise areas.  But I wouldn’t be in a hurry to shove the Dolan family out the door.

The companion bill in the North Carolina Senate that would have effectively killed municipal networks across the state has gone the way of the House bill HB 1252 — into the black hole of the “study committee.”  While the issue may yet re-emerge after it “has been studied,” it’s dead for now.  Thank you to everyone in North Carolina who responded with an outpouring of calls and e-mails to elected officials in the Senate after big cable tried a sneak attack to ram this through this morning.

This is your third victory for consumer rights in less than a month.  We’re on a roll!

Sneaking in the backdoor - the Senate companion bill scheduled for tomorrow morning!

[12:40am ET Thursday Morning – Added More Contact Information, Expanded Article] I have just been informed big cable and their lobbying friends are going to try to pull a fast one on us in North Carolina.  Sometimes you successfully defeat them at the front door while they sneak in the back.  That is precisely what they are going to try tomorrow morning.

Brian Bowman, Public Affairs Manager for the city of Wilson, just informed us that Senate Bill 1004, the companion hit-piece on consumers to HB 1252, has been moved up for consideration in a Senate committee tomorrow morning bright and early.

In a sneak attack, the industry hopes to breeze through the approval process on the Senate side after failing in the North Carolina House of Representatives.  So unless you get on the phone right now and make those calls, today’s victory could become tomorrow’s defeat.  Allowing big cable and telco lobbies to get their foot jammed in the back door is a consumer catastrophe.

It’s clear the industry people have already camped out in several offices and have brought the pizza and coffee.  When Bowman called one of the chairperson’s offices to confirm the time, the administrative assistant literally handed the phone to a cable company employee to explain the bill! How nice of them.

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This really reminds me of 1990.  Back then, a few bad actors in the cable industry were acting so naughty, they created a groundswell of support for legislative action against the cable industry as a whole.  At the beginning of the 1990s, it was sky high rate increases, poor service, and trying to deny competitors access to cable programming networks.  The level of arrogance among the cable companies reached a high point when, then Senator Al Gore (D-TN), called the industry as a “cable cosa nostra.”  We were in the thick of it back then, working to get passage of S.12, a bill to re regulate cable which passed in 1992.

In 2009, some of the same winds are blowing.  The industry is attempting to “test” pricing for broadband that either rations Internet usage, or extorts an enormous amount of money for it.  Industry leaders promise upgrades in return for rate hikes to customers, and then tell their own investors those upgrades are not immediately necessary.  They use inconsistent arguments, bought-and-paid-for research, and clueless legislators who are duped (or bought) to carry their legislative agenda.

It always takes just a few issues, usually coming in sequence, to turn a minor skirmish into a major war, and I think we’re one or two issues away from a full court press to force dramatic changes in the cable and telephone industry.  So far, the issues which are coalescing include:

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Rep. Ty Harrell, who we’ve been lobbying very hard to get to drop a nasty anti-consumer bill designed to stop municipal broadband, has accepted that the matter requires considerable additional review, and HB 1252 has been buried for the year in a “study committee” to “review” its impact.

In North Carolina politics, that usually means an elected official waded too far out in deep water and needs a lifesaver, and the “bill needs further study” approach is a great way to survive an angry constituent bees nest.  The “study committee” will review the legality of the measure and consider the issue before bringing a report back to the House and Senate for consideration, but a number of pieces of legislation that end up going this route are never heard from again.

We’ve received reports the hearing room was packed with people.  Among the “pro-HB1252” audience were people supporting the astroturfing “Americans for Prosperity,” a pro-corporate group that pelted North Carolina residents with harassing recorded calls earlier this week.  The “anti-HB1252” audience was made up of consumers sent by StoptheCap! and Jay Ovittore’s Facebook group fighting Time Warner Cable on various fronts in his home state, as well as representatives from municipalities, advocates for fiber network development, and supporters who learned about the event from Free Press.

This represents our second pro-consumer victory in less than a month against big cable and telco companies.  Thank you to everyone who made calls, sent e-mail, lobbied their elected officials, and attended today’s event.  To those that supported this nonsense in the first place, unless we note an acknowledgment of the mistakes made in supporting this anti-consumer nightmare, this will be an issue we’ll be reminding voters of come next election day.  This remains a fundamental consumer issue, and who stood with and against consumers will need to be revisited.

Bad weather across the state is leading in the news today across the region, but we’ll have further developments on this story later today.