Comcast cable subscribers in Mattapoisett want less bundling and fewer fees.

They and everyone else.

This month, the 6,000 local residents of the small coastal town in southeastern Massachusetts got the opportunity to voice their concerns about Comcast Cable’s performance before the Board of Selectmen at an open town meeting contemplating the renewal of the cable operator’s five year franchise agreement.

The Sippican Week covered the proceedings:

Subscription plans and fees were the main concerns voiced by residents at the meeting.

“I’m just here to see if there is any way we can unbundle or offer some of the channels a la carte, rather than have to pay an exorbitant fee for the channels that are bundled at the different levels,” said Herb Webb.

“Instead of these large packages you have to buy, they could break them up into smaller sub-packages,” said Selectman Tyler Macallister. “Get some feedback from the town and develop packages specially for Mattapoisett.”

Resident Bob Spooner also questioned the $2 fee subscribers are charged for each cable box in addition to their main TV.

“What about the people who have four or five TVs,” said Spooner. “That’s another six or eight dollars a month.”

Macallister agreed, “I’m already paying for those channels, but now I have to pay $2 to get it.”

Selectmen chair Jordan Collyer tried to answer residents’ concerns, much like any local town or city official facing similar complaints would — with understanding and little else. After all, Comcast operates in a largely deregulated marketplace and need not fear threats from elected officials.

Local governments have no say over a cable company’s pricing for its most popular tiers of service, cannot dictate matters of channel bundling or equipment fees, and have little recourse beyond taking bids from other operators willing to serve when an incumbent company’s franchise goes unrenewed.

But that almost never happens. No major cable operator will offer to replace another major operator, meaning the chances that Time Warner Cable, Cox, Cablevision, or Bright House Networks would respond favorably to a request are effectively zero.

But parts of Mattapoisett are lucky enough to at least have a competitive option — Verizon FiOS, although that company also charges for set top equipment and bundles channels together. The local government has little control over Verizon’s service either.

One alternative open to residents and the local government is to support the construction of a community-owned provider that could, as much as programming contracts allow, respond more effectively to these kinds of concerns. Under current regulatory policies, that is about the only way Mattapoisett, and towns like it, can guarantee the presence of a responsive provider ready to meet the collective needs of the community.

Comcast has agreed to provide cable service to 540 homes on Chappaquiddick Island, but only if residents agree to cover part of the cost, which Comcast estimates will be $1,526 per home, assuming everyone offered the service signs up.

Martha’s Vineyard, with Chappaquiddick Island to the east

The cable company has been at odds with town officials in Edgartown, which is responsible for negotiating franchise agreements for six Massachusetts island communities and Edgartown itself. Comcast said it would cost $1.58 million to wire up the small island, and it wants residents to pay $824,000 of that.

The cable company also wants residents to pay extra for connections if their homes lie more than 250 feet from the primary cable Comcast intends to wire across the island. Beyond that, customers will pay Comcast’s usual rates for cable TV, phone, and broadband service.

Edgartown wants Comcast to cover the island towns that surround it, and the company in turn has routinely claimed there were insufficient customers available to recoup the costs of the investment.  But attitudes have softened now that Comcast’s franchise is up for renewal.

Local officials issued a request for proposals in February, 2011 to a variety of cable operators that might be interested in serving Martha’s Vineyard, of which Chappaquiddick is a part. As anticipated, Comcast — the incumbent, was the only company that responded.

But after an extended back and forth, Comcast seemed willing to relent, if someone split the tab.

Local residents have had mixed reactions to the proposal. Some wonder why they should have to foot the bill for a company that will earn $8 million annually from customers on the various nearby islands. Others are willing to pay, but in installments.

Edgartown town administrator Pam Dolby wants a more detailed breakdown of the cost estimate of $1.58 million to wire just over six square miles of the island.

Neighborhood terminal pedestals can serve from a half-dozen to 200 customers. This one is designed to service a small neighborhood.

Time Warner Cable is asking a Padre Island, Tex. customer to pay $850 to move a cable company pedestal box installed in her front yard by mistake.

Dorothy Harper’s home is located right on the shoreline, so utility companies have traditionally placed their equipment in a utility easement adjacent to the street. But Time Warner Cable, for whatever reason, decided to install their unsightly neighborhood terminal pedestal in the middle of her front yard, in front of her home, despite the city’s request that cable operators keep their equipment in a designated easement along the property line.

Harper has been trimming around the pedestal for years, irritated by its presence but infinitely patient that one day the company would do the right thing and move it to its proper location.

Her patience wore out when competing cable company Grande Communications expanded service on Padre Island and felt its own pedestal box would be right at home next to the improperly located one owned by Time Warner. Harper arrived home one afternoon to find both boxes happily creating a tremendous eyesore.

Harper told The Caller she called Grande Communications, which eventually moved their pedestal to the proper location. But Time Warner Cable proved infinitely more stubborn, even when the city got involved:

Edward Villarreal, who issues fiber optic and utility permits for the city’s Development Services, visited Harper’s property. He took photos of the cable pedestal and made phone calls to Time Warner on her behalf, without success, he said.

“It’s definitely an eyesore I wouldn’t want in the middle of my property,” Villarreal told Troubleshooter Thursday.

Harper got tired of the fight with Time Warner and backed off for a while, she said.

“Every time I drive up to our home, I am angered again at Time Warner and their negative response to a problem that their workers created,” she said.

Recently she called Time Warner again and was told they would move the pedestal if she paid $850, Harper said.

The newspaper’s troubleshooter intervened, calling Time Warner’s regional headquarters looking for a resolution and found someone a bit more sympathetic.

Jon Gary Herrera, regional vice president of communications for the cable operator said complaints about unsightly cable pedestals are common, but the company would be willing to move the one in front of Mrs. Harper’s home if the mistake was theirs.

If not, Time Warner has a solution to quiet chronic complainers. The company has been known to provide a rock facade to cover the ugly pale green lawn stump and make things more landscape friendly.

One reader had a last-ditch solution in case that did not work:

Make the switch to Grande and then arrange for someone to “accidentally” do a hit and run on the cable box thus forcing Time Warner to come out and place it in the proper location.

When Time Warner Cable can’t reach a retransmission consent agreement with local broadcasters, it can thank a loophole left in a badly-written contract the cable company has with Nexstar Broadcasting, a Texas station owner group, for providing a stop-gap solution.

A federal judge ruled late last week Time Warner Cable was allowed to replace local affiliates with Nexstar-owned stations because their contract does not prohibit the cable operator from the practice.

When the cable company’s carriage agreement with Hearst Corporation expired in July, Time Warner replaced affected local stations in Ohio, Kentucky, Florida, North Carolina, Vermont and New York with Nexstar-owned stations based in Terre Haute, Ind. (NBC affiliate, WTWO-TV), Wilkes-Barre, Pa. (NBC affiliate, WBRE-TV), and Rochester, N.Y. (CBS affiliate, WROC-TV).

Viewers in Kentucky ended up getting the local news from a station in western New York, located hundreds of miles away, but cable subscribers still got to watch their favorite network shows.

Nexstar sued Time Warner in federal court to stop the practice.

But Judge Jorge Solis could find nothing in Nexstar’s agreement prohibiting the cable company from importing the distant stations.

“Nowhere in the [agreement] does Nexstar limit its retransmission consent,” Solis wrote. “It appears the language limiting the broadcast […] is not present when Nexstar gives its retransmission consent under Section 1. In fact, it is specifically omitted when describing the ‘retransmission consent’ under Section 1.”

Solis refused to grant a request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction stopping Time Warner from carrying Nexstar stations outside of their designated local broadcast areas.

A surprise announcement from the U.S. Supreme Court that it will hear an appeal brought by Comcast Corporation in a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of Philadelphia consumers, despite a pending settlement, may mean the Supreme Court is on the verge of issuing another business-friendly ruling that will make class action cases more difficult to file.

Comcast had reached a tentative settlement in June with lawyers who brought a $875 million class-action lawsuit on behalf of Philadelphia area cable subscribers. The antitrust case, originally filed in 2003, accused Comcast of strategically swapping or acquiring cable systems owned by Marcus Cable, Greater Philadelphia Cablevision, Inc., Lenfest Communications, Inc., AT&T, Adelphia Communications Corp., Time Warner, and Patriot Media in and around Philadelphia for the purpose of creating a super-sized Comcast cable system that could deter competitors from entering the market and allow Comcast to charge higher prices for service.

RCN Telecom Services originally intended to compete for cable customers in the Philadelphia region, but found it could not break into the market because Comcast allegedly hired as many available technicians it could find and tied them down with exclusive contracts. RCN also claimed Comcast targeted potential customers with special, allegedly below-cost deals to retain their business. RCN later filed for bankruptcy.

“Stated bluntly, Comcast and other large cable operators have demonstrated both the inclination and the wherewithal to use their market power to crush broadband competition in their local markets whenever it has the audacity to appear,” RCN alleged.

In 2002, RCN went public with a series of allegations:

Comcast intimidates independent construction and installation contractors. Comcast prevented or tried to prevent about 15 Philadelphia-area contractors from doing business with RCN through “non-compete” clauses, RCN alleged. The company provided specific names of contractors and Comcast personnel in sealed documents.

Those practices dated at least to the late 1990s, when Comcast acquired Suburban Cable, RCN said. Both Suburban and Comcast went “to extraordinary lengths to document ‘violations’ and intimidate contractors who were thought to be in contact with, or working for, RCN,” RCN said.

RCN cited instances of Suburban Cable employees, many of whom later worked for Comcast, allegedly following contractors in their trucks and taking photographs to document contractors seen at an RCN office or work site. These photographs then became “evidence,” RCN said, to support contractors’ termination.

As for predatory pricing, RCN claimed that before its entry into Folcroft in 2000, Comcast allegedly established a sales “swat team” instructed to sign up customers for 18-month contracts in exchange for cheaper cable services.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys want subscribers to receive refunds representing the savings they would have enjoyed had a competitor successfully forced prices down.

Comcast and the plaintiffs’ counsel reached a tentative settlement in June after both sides learned the lawsuit would proceed to trial this September. But in a surprise announcement, the U.S. Supreme Court suddenly decided to step in and hear an appeal filed by Comcast. Comcast immediately declared the settlement incomplete and has now declined to proceed with it, believing it has a more favorable outcome waiting at the Supreme Court.

Kenneth A. Jacobson, a professor at Temple University’s law school, told the Philadelphia Inquirer the Supreme Court does not typically decide to hear a case “during the settlement negotiation and approval process.”

Other Supreme Court watchers suspect the Court’s sudden involvement in the case means it is likely to issue a precedent-setting decision, more likely than not in Comcast’s favor, that will be talked about in law journals for the next decade.

Comcast Center in downtown Philadelphia

The specific point of Comcast’s appeal that interests the Supreme Court has to do with how a class action case certifies damages to the court hearing the case. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case based on, “whether a district court may certify a class action without resolving whether the plaintiff class has introduced admissible evidence, including expert testimony, to show that the case is susceptible to awarding damages on a class-wide basis.

Currently, courts insist that the burden of proof for damages lies with the plaintiff, but they are not necessarily required to demonstrate the actual individual damages suffered by each member of a proposed class action. Many judges accept the concept of fixed group damages based on a composite of an average proposed class member. That amount gets multiplied by the number of members in the certified class action to arrive at the total requested damages. Typically, both sides negotiate a final settlement, deduct attorney fees and costs, and then class members typically get a change in a company’s policies, coupons good for a future purchase or an actual refund in the mail.

The Supreme Court may find that concept inadequate, and insist on a detailed analysis of actual harm done to each proposed class member — a high and potentially expensive hurdle to cross for many class action cases. Legal analysts suggest the intended effect of such a decision would be to further deter class action lawsuits against companies, because the costs and complexities involved would increasingly not be justified.

In the Comcast case, the cable company wanted the court to dismiss the case, and for some very novel reasons:

1. Since Comcast effectively kept competing “overbuilding” cable systems out of Philadelphia, there is no evidence of any theoretical competition benefits such as reduced prices;
2. Since no competitor actually got their service up and running in Philadelphia, Comcast argues there was no competition to eliminate;
3. RCN, in Comcast’s view, was never actually going to start service in Philadelphia because of their own financial woes;
4. Without actual competition in Philadelphia, there is no basis for any expert witness hired by the plaintiff to credibly estimate damages;
5. Even if Comcast was engaged in anti-competitive behavior in Delaware County, that cannot be used by plaintiffs to serve as evidence of class-wide impact for the entire multi-county Philadelphia Comcast cluster.

Over the past few years, the Court has ruled in favor of corporations trying to compel less-costly legal avenues — like mandatory arbitration — for consumers who feel harmed by a company’s actions.