Cablevision CEO Jim Dolan may have to eat his words when he told shareholders he was done giving promotional discounts to customers bouncing back and forth between competing providers. Now Verizon has given Cablevision customers an excuse to say goodbye to the cable company for at least the next two years.

The Verizon FiOS $79.99 Triple Play promotion is back and includes a $300 Visa rebate card and free activation when ordering from Verizon’s website.

The package includes:

The incoming CEO of Time Warner Cable will walk away with more than $50 million just for getting out-of-the-way of a sale or breakup of the company.

Robert Marcus is scheduled to take over the CEO role Jan. 1 after Glenn Britt retires. But there is a good chance Marcus won’t have a cable company to run if executives decide to accept anticipated takeover offers due within weeks that could turn ownership of Time Warner over to Charter Communications or split up subscribers among several potential buyers including Comcast, Cox, and Charter.

Reuters reports Marcus will earn the most if he can hold off buyers for the next four weeks until he becomes CEO. Under his employment contract, Marcus would then qualify for a generous goodbye package:

• A compensation bonus amounting to three times his base salary of $1.5 million;
• A departure award amounting to three times his usual $5 million annual bonus;
• Permission to cash out the large amount of stock he has earned as part of his compensation, now valued at $37 million.

In total, Marcus could earn $56.5 million for just one day of work — long enough to shake the hands of the new buyer(s) and head for the elevators for the last time. If the company sells before Dec. 31, Marcus will still land on his feet, earning a severance package valued at $47.5 million.

In a separate move, Time Warner Cable executive vice president Peter Stern dumped 4,253 shares of his company’s stock at $130 a share, taking $552,890 in compensation.

While top managers are routinely offered generous departure packages more commonly known as “golden parachutes,” thousands of lower-level Time Warner Cable employees will likely face the ax within months of any sale, predicted one analyst. In similarly sized mergers and buyouts, the largest job losses will impact call center workers and middle management. Other employees will likely leave if asked to move to regional operations centers in other cities where the buyer(s) operate. At least one analyst said it was unusual for Time Warner Cable to proceed with a CEO switch while the company is in play.

Marcus understands how the business of mergers and acquisitions work; he started his career as an attorney specializing in the practice.

It’s happy days at Comcast’s marketing and public relations department. How does a cable company pocket an extra $1.50 a month from 21.6 million cable TV customers without facing the wrath of the masses? Blame it on greedy broadcasters and quietly bank up to $32.4 million a month in new revenue.

Comcast wants to break out the cost of some of its programming disputes with local stations from your monthly cable bill and add an extra $1.50 monthly surcharge the company is calling a “Broadcast TV Fee” starting in the new year.

Comcast isn’t promising this $1.50 fee covers the total cost of licensing local stations for cable carriage, and they have no plans for similar surcharges for cable networks that have also been known to ask for a lot at contract renewal time. Customers may not realize that in some cases, the local NBC station just so happens to be owned by Comcast-NBC, offering easy opportunities to boost the asking price without too much trouble from co-workers at Comcast Cable.

Broadband Reports notes that isn’t the only new fee coming soon to a Comcast bill near you, starting Jan. 1. The company is also raising prices for cable television by $1-2 for many tiers, increasing the modem rental fee another dollar to an unprecedented $8 a month, and jacking up rates by $2 a month on almost all levels of broadband service.

The Don’t Care Bears

If the former Soviet Union ran a cable company, it would probably resemble Comcast’s customer care centers, filled with long lines and inflexible, bureaucratic representatives that refuse to think outside the (cable) box. Philebrity.com calls the cable company’s downtown office on Delaware Avenue in Philadelphia the Comcast Get Out of TV Jail Center:

If you have ever had to return your cable boxes or pay your shut-off cable bill in cash because there’s a big pay-per-view wrestling event you need to see that night, you know this place. We know you know. And we know you feel hot shame for ever even knowing what this place is, or standing in its soul-sucking lines on the other side of the bulletproof glass, and we know that you don’t want anyone to know you’ve been there. So we’ll talk about it for you. To know the Comcast Get-Out-Of-TV-Jail Center is to know failure up close, to be on intimate speaking terms with failure, and to know that the conversation with failure is always mostly in the bitter parlance of popular t-shirts from the 1980s: Life’s a bitch and then you die. 

The apparatchiks ensconced behind Comcast’s bulletproof glass know you cannot get to them, so some have their worst behavior on full display. Some think they know you before you even reach the counter. That angry-looking customer with the file folder? ‘Not for me,’ Carol says, stalling for time with the customer in front of her just long enough to let Brenda the Temp deal with him as next in line. It’s the closest thing to the Department of Motor Vehicles, where long waiting times never interfere with an on-time lunch break or extended chat with a colleague while you sit the day away.

“When many of us here in Philly think about Comcast, this is what we think of,” writes the online magazine. “Not the gleaming tower, nor the endless fun of Xfinity, but this place. This sad awful place. Because this is the place that says, “This is really what we think of you. We know you are worthless. Look at you, with your cardboard box of outdated remotes and modems, and your folded up twenties, hauling our sad s*** back to us like a doting animal with a dead rodent between its teeth.”

Malone

Dr. John Malone’s Liberty Global has picked up an extra billion dollars it can use towards any plan to combine Time Warner Cable and/or Cablevision under Charter Communications.

Liberty has sold off some of its assets to build an enormous financial war chest it could use to launch a new wave of cable consolidation in the United States, potentially leaving Charter Cable as the country’s second biggest cable operator, just behind Comcast.

AMC Networks announced it will pay $1 billion to buy Liberty-owned ChelloMedia, a major international programmer and content distributor that operates 68 channels and networks available to more than 390 million households in 138 countries. Chellomedia is not well-known in North America but its networks are household names overseas. The deal includes Chello Multicanal, Chello Central Europe, Chello Zone, Chello Latin America and Chello DMC. In addition, Chellomedia’s stakes in its joint ventures with CBS International, A+E Networks, Zon Optimus and certain other partners are also part of the sale.

That $1 billion could be a key part of any blockbuster buyout deal because Malone can leverage that and other money with an even larger infusion from today’s easy access capital market. He has done it before, leveraging countless buyouts of other cable operators that built Malone’s Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) into the country’s largest cable operator by the early 1990s.

According to Shahid Khan, a media and cable industry consultant with Mediamorph, by this time next year Charter Communications could be just two million subscribers away from beating Comcast as the nation’s biggest cable operator.

Khan believes Malone laid his consolidation foundation with Liberty’s significant ownership interest in Charter Communications, from which he can build a new cable empire.

The most likely targets for consolidation are Time Warner Cable and Cablevision. According to Leichtman Research, as of this summer Comcast is the nation’s largest operator with 21.7 million subscribers. Regulators are unlikely to approve any deals growing Comcast even larger. But combining Charter, Time Warner Cable, and Cablevision would deliver 19.1 million subscribers under the Charter brand. A handful of smaller deals with minor operators like SuddenLink, Cable ONE, Mediacom, or Bright House Networks would quickly put Charter over the top of Comcast.

Malone’s public argument is that larger cable operators have more leverage to secure better deals and rates for cable programming, equipment vendors, and suppliers. It also delivers “cost savings” mostly through layoffs and cutting back on redundant operations like customer care call centers.

But Malone could also use the combined market power of the supersized cable company to keep competitors non-viable, especially for cable television programming. Frontier Communications learned what it is like to be a small player when its inherited FiOS networks in Washington, Oregon and Indiana lost Verizon’s volume discounts for cable programming. Frontier quickly found the programming rates it could negotiate on its own were so dramatically higher, it tried to convince FiOS TV subscribers to switch to satellite television instead.

Charter could also raise prices for broadband services in areas where its potential partners have not increased them quickly enough.

Ironically, AMC Networks’ one billion dollar buyout of Chellomedia could ultimately become the catalyst for a Malone-driven buyout of AMC’s former owner — Cablevision.